Francine Tint: After a Dream

Tint is a New York-based artist currently working in a studio downtown. Her interest is in furthering the tradition of abstract-expressionism, whose tenets and formal expressiveness are central to the way she works in painting. Her paintings tend to focus on color, with abstract embellishments—splotches, blots, and lines—rendered intuitively across the compositional field. In many ways, her allegiance continues to be directed toward the great painters of America’s abstract-expressionist tradition: such as Pollock and Gorky. But her determination to present her own, independent vision--one that shows interest in color and in improvisation emphasize originality rather than reiteration.

For Tint, the long history of her artmaking is much more an inspiration than it is a cul-de-sac. While her paintings are stylistically in close conversation with each other, it is also true that she strives to create an imaginative space in which improvisation and conscious decision occur in equal measure. The artist works intuitively, but that does not mean that she is not consciously aware of her painting practice. Tint works in acrylic and creates effects that look like staining. The surfaces are thin, rather than being thick with impasto. Generally, abstract embellishments are added to a monochromatic background. The palette ranges from a pastel color scheme to the ongoing use of darker color.

“When Clement Greenberg came to my studio, that was sort of the beginning of me being noticed,” Tint said. “I think by being good at it, I was accepted. Almost like jazz musicians, you enter the abstract art club by being good. I was like a painter’s painter.”

Like poetry, Tint's feelings lie at the center of her painting. Additionally, abstract-expressionism, as a kind of style with a long history, remains open enough and profound enough to continue in the hands of thoughtful practitioners generations after it has lost its dominance as a movement. Painting is primarily an improvisatory process, in which the canvas becomes a field onto which my formal decisions are recorded in paint. There is a transparency of decision-making that renders her works accurate records of choices; thus enabling the artist to be as free as possible as she proceeds in her work--it is an approach that is very contemporary and, given the context, very American.