Francine Tint
 Rainbow Trout, acrylic on canvas, 38" x 130"
Francine Tint is currently exhibiting at The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington NY - The Heckscher at 90: Then and Now ~ Old Favorites and New Acquisitions - on view to July 18 www.heckscher.org
Glass Room, acrylic on canvas, 60" x 40"
Solar Express, acrylic on canvas, 60" x 33"
 Aurum, acrylic on canvas, 32" x 105"  Spring Fever, acrylic on canvas, 55" x 22"  Color Whisper, acrylic on canvas, 44" x 126"
Review by Chris Rywalt January 2010: Winter White at Tria
Gallery
"...If I absolutely had to choose the best in the show, I might go with Francine Tint's painting [Dream Life of Angels]. It's a beautiful and subdued Abstract Expressionist piece, all nearly monochrome and warm beige except for a splashy stab of blue. It's mutely eloquent, the way good Abstract Expressionism can be, without being overwhelming. The tight range of values holds the whole thing together and the width is just enough to encompass your field of view and hold you there. It's equal parts restraint and abandon - close hues slapped on wildly - and it works."
Dream Life of Angels, acrylic on canvas, 38" x 70"
Review by Karen Wilkin, Art in America, October 2008 Francine Tint at Tria Gallery Asked for advice by young artists, in the days before unfledged MFA candidates were guaranteed more attention than seasoned practitioners, Clement Greenberg often urged them to "live a long time." The history of van Gogh's sales, the critic would explain, suggested that he would have died a rich man, if he hadn't killed himself at 37. But Greenberg's reply also arose from his belief that making art required a long-term commitment to the exploration of its possibilities. Witness Francine Tint, who is no novice. For decades, she has been making abstract paintings based on the unpremeditated manipulation of materials. Her strengths have always been her idiosyncratic sense of color, her ability to draw energetically at large scale, and her refusal to make ingratiating pictures. ln her recent work, her audacity is undiminished, her orchestration of hues more uninhibited than ever, and her drawing - sometimes manifest as line, sometimes assigned to the edges of color incidents - even more unpredictable. The drama in the nearly 9-foot-wide Irish Smoke (2007) resides largely in the oddness of Tint's palette, a near-rococo combination of rose, moss green, silver gray, golden yellow and murk that somehow invokes both urban cacophony and landscape. In Object of Desire (2008; 48 by 69 inches), a slapdash expanse of cinnabar red punctuated with swipes of strange greens and blues, the astringent color is still the driving emotional force, but it has to compete with emphatic surface inflections and over-scale loopy drawing. Tint has remained true to her original convictions about what a painting can be, yet her vigorous, street-smart recent works seem utterly of the moment. When she first began exhibiting 25 years ago, her work announced her solidarity with color-based abstractionists even though Tint's rough-hewn canvases often seemed quirkier and brasher than theirs. Today, her still notably quirky and brash pictures demand to be read differently. With their acerbic hues and fierce gestures, they can be seen as both affirmations of her belief in the power of intuitive, non-figurative painting and as a non-ironic commentary on, say, Gerhard Richter's simulacra of color-based, gestural abstraction. Tint's aims haven't changed, but the context for her work has, allowing - or forcing - us to consider it in new ways.  Irish Smoke, acrylic on canvas,
34.5" x 105" www.francinetint.com
All images copyright Francine Tint
May 2010
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