Francine Tint Is Finally ‘Having Her Time'
A visitor to Francine Tint's Greenwich Village studio could be forgiven for wondering if the woman before them is about to embark on a passage through turbulent seas. In her yellow wet suit, rubber clogs and shower cap, Tint resembles a cross between the Gorton's Fisherman and a hazmat suit-wearing Karen Silkwood.
But as the pigments splashed all over her 'painting garb,' as Tint calls her attire, attest, the journey is here, in this workshop, before canvases the size of standard school buses and colors so luscious you want to ingest them. This work — her work — is 'my travel, my marriage and my children,' Tint said.
And now, at 82, some 50 years after launching a career as an Abstract Expressionist painter in New York City, Tint is finally receiving the recognition she craved as a youngster growing up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, longing for an artist's life on the other side of the river.
She's had successes — her paintings, which range in size from 10 inches to 20 feet, have been exhibited in more than 30 solo shows in the United States and Europe, and housed in permanent collections including the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Ill., and the Clement Greenberg Collection at the Portland Museum of Art. She received a Pollock-Krasner award in 2004, 2017 and 2023, along with a $25,000 grant from the Gottlieb Foundation in 2003.
Still, her dance card has never been as full as it is now. To wit: A solo show in November at the Upsilon Gallery in Manhattan, which featured eight of her pieces along with works from Helen Frankenthaler, one of Tint's inspirations. Not long after, Snap Collective published a monograph of her work from 1975 to the present.
'The book provides valuable context for her role as a key figure in the third generation of American postwar abstract colorist painters,' said Beatrice Caprioli, the book's editor and Tint's studio manager.
In February, Upsilon's London outpost held a show of Tint's work; a forthcoming short film about her, 'Panoramic View,' by the filmmaker Pola Rapaport, will be released later this spring. Then there is her show at 68 Prince Street, a new gallery in Kingston, N.Y., from April 26 to June 26.
'I was looking for an artist that really was going to make a statement for our inaugural show,' said the gallery's curator, Alan Goolman. Tint came to mind. 'This woman is having her time right this very minute.'
Tint is not sure why her time did not come sooner, though she suspects it might have something to do with being a woman in a male-dominated field.
'It was very, very sexist,' she said of the 1960s art scene and beyond. 'I can toot my horn now, 52 years later: I was better than most of them. If I was ever in a group show, my work would shine. But I was kept down. There was jealousy.'
Tint came to Manhattan at 16, crashing with a friend in the Village. In the early 1960s, she married a painter, and she moved into his enormous Soho loft for which they paid $90 a month. The relationship was tumultuous; they competed, literally, for space. 'Men couldn't deal with women's talent; there was only room for theirs,' she said. 'A friend told me to 'Take his work down and put yours up instead.'' So she did. The marriage failed, but her confidence flourished.
She did freelance work as a stylist and costume designer for the likes of David Bowie, Andy Warhol and Ridley Scott, and for 'Saturday Night Live.'
'I decided to make my own money in fashion and costume so I would not be dependent on the men, or any man,' she said.
At night, she took classes at the Brooklyn Museum and the Pratt Institute. She painted nonstop. She hung out at Max's Kansas City, the famed night spot on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, where she befriended artists like Larry Poons, Brice Marden and Dan Christensen. The critic Clement Greenberg became a pal. For the next 13 years, the two spent hours in her studio analyzing her work, which also included figurative sculpture. Around the same time, she began experimenting more with color, which 'should be a delicious shock to the eye,' she said. 'I wanted colors to layer, melt and dissolve into each other, to do unpredictable things.'
'Her sense of color is very, very strong,' said Robert S. Mattison, an art historian and professor emeritus of art history at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. 'It's based on her sense of light, and that's really one of the characteristics and spatial qualities of the work.
'They suggest a kind of infinite space, which is quite interesting. In my view, she's making some of the best paintings of her career.'
Tint typically works on four or five canvases of various sizes at a time, wrapping them across her studio's walls and ceiling or plopping them on the floor for a bird's-eye view. Brushes are not her only tool of choice: She stains, sponges, splashes, smears, streaks, drips, drizzles and glops paint onto the canvas, often adding sand, mesh or gel for texture. It's a messy business (hence, the hazmat suit).
She has no idea why certain colors or textures speak to her; she lets her intuition guide her. The ultimate goal is for the viewer to interpret the work through their own lens.
David Ebony, a curator and former managing editor of Art in America, got to know Tint's work through Poons, a mutual friend. Ebony considers her work a bridge between Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, which entails throwing diluted paint onto an unprimed canvas. 'Chance is a very important essential theme for the Color Field painters,' he said. 'She'll throw paint on a canvas, and that's the moment of chance. But then she manipulates that chance and creates forms and unites colors without those chance moments.'
The accolades Tint has received are welcome, but she has been taking it in stride — or in as much stride as she can.
'Artists are pretty crazy, and I am,' Tint said. She meditates daily, has been in a healthy relationship for the last decade and takes great solace in her work. Getting older isn't fun. 'It's hard opening the cans of paint,' she said. 'But I do it. I'm OK. I'm happy. I'm a product of doing what I want to do in life.'
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