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Over more than five decades, Francine Tint has created a remarkable body of work. Her paintings display an exhilarating freedom of execution combined with an original and frequently surprising color sensibility, varying in size from 10 inches to nearly 20 feet. Her brushwork ranges from languorous and undulating swaths of paint to aggressive and agitated gestures. Her works speak of a powerful and unwavering commitment to the visual and emotional vocabulary of abstract painting, and they embody the artist’s personal and deeply held belief in the power of intuitive creation.
Tint’s direct heritage may be traced to Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting. Her admiration for those artists is enormous, but she also reaches more deeply into art history. Artists who are touchstones for Tint include Édouard Manet, Francisco Goya, Pompeian frescoes from the Roman Empire, and especially J.M.W Turner for his reliance on inspiration and radical painting techniques. She is particularly fond of 16th-century Mannerist painters; Jacopo Pontormo’s idiosyncratic colors and anatomical and spatial distortions fascinate Tint. She also has a deep interest in Asian brush paintings. Recently, Tint has been mining her books on paleolithic cave paintings where she is captivated by their creators’ profound identification with the animals they depicted, an identification which extends to handprints stenciled directly onto the cave walls. She is reminded of the foot and handprints that appear in her paintings.
Tint’s work has been exhibited in over thirty solo shows in the United States and Europe, and is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Clement Greenberg collection at the Portland Art Museum and the Krannert Art Museum in Chicago. Her work is in private and corporate collections including Pepsi Co. and Mount Sinai Hospital.



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Listening to Francine Tint talk with Brainard Carey on this podcast was a pure joy for me. Frankenthaler has long been one of the artists whom I have felt to be in dialog with through my own work. Tint also mentions Larry Poons and Morris Louis, who are also heroes of mine. I always find it gratifying to find someone like Francine Tint, who is on the same page as I am in terms of aesthetics, process, and general philosophy. Throughout my own career, I have always felt the lack of an intimate urban milieu like the one Tint describes, where a serendipitous meeting in a bar or on the street could lead to a lifelong friendship between other artists, critics, etc. Maybe I was born just a bit too late. Damn you, social media! Anyway, thank you, Brainard, for bringing this artist to my attention. I wish I could run over to see this exhibit before it closes, but unfortunately, that will not happen. Is there a book or catalog to go with the show? Maybe I’ll contact the gallery.
[…] Francine Tint joined us to talk about her show at Upsilon Gallery, In Dialogue with Helen Frankenthaler, which runs until November 30. Tint has long admired Frankenthaler as a colorist and indeed as one of the only women of her time doing the work she was doing. Additionally, her connection with her mentor, well known artist Larry Poons, began in a bar, she admitted with a laugh. To hear more about Tint’s current show, listen to this delightful interview. […]