So much more fulfilling drawing from the real thing - other Figurative and Nude Studies from Life Drawing and Painting sessions featured in the Gallery...

Birmingham Newsagents, Summer 1964 - Sold to a Private Collector, more Landscapes, Cityscapes and Architecture are featured in the Categories - Go to Gallery Stiill filled with enthusiasm after exciting Pre-Diploma course, I'd tour the streets and canals of my native city before going to Art College where the excitement was doused only to be resurrected 50 years ago where I found a spiritual home near the Industrial Thames of SE London

A rare example of what may seem a Classical Art nude by the artist Chris Francis - but it isn’t for a number of reasons:- It’s painted direct from the model, no monotone underpainting, in fact, no initial drawing. It’s rendered in Acrylic including silver metallic paint. There was no pre-conception of what the model would look like It was painted in response to immediate observation of the colour, tones, forms and shapes present which combined to create an image that

Starting a Pre-diploma Art Course in the 1960s, introduced me to Life Drawing and Painting from a real model whereas previously I had, as a teenage schoolboy, only studied the two-dimensional, monochrome naked females in naturist magazines. Since it was by then taboo for artists to copy from pictures, it was an initial a jolt to see pubic hair rather than an airbrushed white triangle – much like the shock of John Ruskin on his wedding night. The sensation did not deter me an

Copying alone is not the way to create art. If so it would only have required Constable to paint a Haywain and for everybody else to reproduce it – come to think of it, that’s what watercolourists actually do. Thus, they are painters not artists.

When I was at Art School in the 1960s copying was an anathema. In any case, I was enthralled by the Impressionists including Monet and Cezanne. There was also was a revolution in art education with great encouragement to explore and experiment. It wasn’t a matter of learning tradition, convention and technique. The nature of what I was exploring was the built-environment of industrial city of Birmingham with a cityscape of Neo-Gothic architecture, a web of canals (bigger than