Interview with Shingo Francis

On a cloudy April day, just as the first cherry blossoms were beginning to open, I met Shingo Francis at the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art, in Japan, where his work featured in the exhibition “The Unseen Relationship: Form and Abstraction.” According to chief curator Takashi Suzuki the show’s premise was to “display historical paintings alongside younger artists’ work in the hope of finding new synchronicities between them.” In the first room for example, a painting by Shingo was displayed near one by his father, Sam Francis, suggesting a dialogue between the works, and the artists’ practices, spanning six decades.

Born in Santa Monica, California, in 1969, Francis moved to Japan at three years of age, then back to the US from the age of thirteen. With an acute, subtle sense of color, Francis’ works are saturated with layers of thin oil washes that draw the eye closer to what the artist calls “the Abyss.” Despite having an oceanic aura, Shingo’s perspective is not one of looking across the sea as in traditional landscape paintings. Instead, his perspective is one of being submerged or immersed in the ocean, unable to recognize sky from saltwater.

What experiences did you have in Los Angeles, during your early career, that led you down the path you are currently on?

I learned to look at books in my father’s library. I read a lot of William Blake, looked at Tennyson and I was interested in Shelley. I found a lot of solitude living close to the beach, not really being used to the United States, there was something about the beach, the ocean, in Santa Monica. I was able to connect with the rhythms of the sea, the waves, the light, the sun, the clouds and the moon. I was able to put those into poetry of my own.

What about your impetus to paint?

I went to school at an art department out in Claremont and James Turrell did a big installation in the desert. That had a big impact on me. And I hung out in the ceramics department a lot, run by Paul Soldner, who was friends with Peter Voulkos. A number of Japanese students also came to study. Soldner talked a lot about nature, letting the environment into your work. Hanging out with those folks as opposed to my painting department influenced me to look at the environment and its colors, to think about how they put it into the work.

Then I started to realize more about the light and space artists: Robert Irwin, Maria Nordman, Hap Tivey, early Bruce Nauman, and of course Turrell, John McCracken, Peter Alexander, Craig Kauffman and Larry Bell. How they used light. I got really into that—light, space—looking at how light reflects off surfaces and how surfaces are affected by light.

In Los Angeles I started making paintings that were pared down, trying to isolate certain parts of the canvases, into light and dark, creating a contrast. I saw a lot of contrasts in the city as far as how much space there is, how much light, it is washed out but as it starts to get darker the sky gets dark, dark blue. The landscape too—the land starts to get dark and there is a light horizon where a real contrast starts to happen.

Where are your colors born?

I am drawn to primary colors: red, yellow and blue, not so much green; all the combinations between those colors, as well as orange, magenta, violets and purples. Those colors come from a relationship to the light in California. Colors get so vibrant. I remember walking up a canyon in Santa Monica in mid-February—spring comes early in southern California—I looked up at the valley wall and noticed this intense light . . . yellow and violet flowers already starting to bloom. The California poppies are bright orange. I found those vibrant colors to express life and much more volume.

In your Yokohama studio, I remember the last rays of light hitting your easel just before sunset. How do you contemplate natural, artificial and possibly spiritual light in your paintings?

I want the painting to have a sense of “holding” the light. I want the painting to have a light of its own. That is why it is so important for me to layer the works very slowly. In time my physical actions blend into the metaphysical; it is very deliberate. I mix down my pigments with medium so there is a translucency . . . and there is a lot of space between the molecules, allowing the light in. If you get down to the molecular level, I don’t know exactly what the light is doing in there, but I feel it.

I want the painting to glow. Light reveals the unknown. We all have light within us, the potential to reveal who we are. One of the strengths of painting, or art in general, is the ability to transform, to affect people’s consciousness, to take them outside of the ordinary consciousness, at the same time affect them so much that they are given that spark. I think its just spark.

I see sparks, or flares, in your work on paper, in the first room. How does this creative process differ from the layering in your oil paintings? 

The works on paper have more movement, but both are about space. I am taking paper as a space, a space that already exists, that is why I leave a lot of white in the upper and lower margins. I am working horizontally with the composition to give a sense of space. I think the eye naturally moves that way. John Berger talks about how the eye reads the landscape; it searches. It’s a very natural thing for us to see something horizontally. In all my works I create space within space using one clear, stoic line.

Across from this large work on paper is a painting by Sam Francis (Untitled (Blue), oil on canvas, 1951–52). The brushwork in both is filled with luminosity, but your compositional strategy is, as you say, more “stoic.” How do your paintings formally relate to and differ from your father’s work? 

I grew up watching him paint, and always had a little space in his studio where I would paint. I think there is something about his light touch—I remember Al Held mentioning in an interview that my father had a light hand. And that was something he had since way back in the Paris days, when he made the painting on display here. In my earlier work too, he told me if you glob it all on too much you will have a hard time taking it off, so its better to start light and then add dark.

I don’t want to loose the light, something natural. It’s my sensibility to start light, and always add more. I am not sure of the relationship to my monochromatic works. He leaves a lot of white space, for instance the “edge paintings.” At one point Japan really influenced him, using white space or kūhaku. I am working the opposite way. I am doing positive onto negative, working into the white, establishing a depth. Taking the darkness out of the light. But he was interested in pulling the positive out of the negative space of the white. In a sense I negate his approach to whiteness, but we are moving in the same direction.  

Your father once said: “New York needs Tokyo mud. Los Angeles needs Tokyo mud. Tokyo needs the World.” Do you think this still applies today?

I think Tokyo still needs the world today. Japan tends to close itself off, since there are fewer and fewer students going abroad, fewer and fewer artists going abroad. Interaction with other countries is narrowing. I think Japan in general has a tendency to close itself off to the world, like it did during the Edo period. I think my father was attributing his feeling that Japan will isolate itself if it doesn’t make an effort to connect itself to the world, to make itself dynamic, multicultural and international. I think he was saying Japan needs to stay connected.

I am not quite sure what he means by the “Tokyo mud” part, maybe people are trying to be too ideal in New York and LA, just as it is. I am not quite sure what he means by mud . . .

You and your father certainly have a direct relationship to Japan in a tangible sense, which could be called “Tokyo mud.” This exhibition emphasizes the painterly relationships between artists from different generations but there are also bicultural currents since all of the earlier artists are from the West and all the younger artists are (all or part) Japanese.

I sometimes struggle between those two worlds, Japan and the United States. I attempt to control a tight space, but when I go back to my father I can certainly learn a lot from his generation. Such as leaving myself the space I need to just stop and notice things. 

Where do your horizon lines come from?

First, they vaguely come from my observation of nature while traveling. Then it became more about a boundary and my relationship with two cultures; how I relate to these cultures, being one or the other. What the boundary represents is the interaction, the point between these two entities. It expands not just into culture but it can include personality and psychology, so it became kind of a greater boundary.

Is it different for each painting? Do they all emerge from lightness into darkness?

These two recent pieces, Abyss (Violet) and Abyss (Blue) come from darkness to light. It’s a violet depth, no black, just dark violet. Slowly the light dissolves the darkness . . . For me it’s the edge of the abyss, up until a certain point we have awareness of who we are, where we came from and where we are going. But there is a boundary there we can’t cross: where we are really going, who we really are, and realizing all phenomena are really just about our awareness. The light dissolves as we get to know ourselves, the veiled parts of our being, our existence, and the nature of this world.

Where painting is a metaphysical activity for you?

The paintings express a sense of time. They are done with very thin layers. They are about creating a depth that I feel, from the unseen, the unknown. It is slowly bringing that about, slowly making it appear. It is paradoxical, making a void appear, it comes from that sense. Whether it is successful or not depends on whether it has a depth that goes beyond the two-dimensional. I want it to be something you feel, more infinite, beyond this limited space. It is actually a portal, an entryway to your self.

An entryway to realize there is no boundary between oneself and others?

Yes. There is no difference between me and this floor, or between me and this rock—that is what I am reaching for, something as collective as that. I want people to sense that there is a connection to something greater. It’s a realization, I mean self-awareness is a personal journey but at the same time you realize that you are connected to everything.