Yvonne Mabs Francis

I was born in Oxford in 1945. I attended Brighton and the Slade School of Art in the Sixties. After I left college I spent eleven years creating a dress design and manufacturing business called MABS. By 1980 I had returned to painting full time. Around 1998 I began a series of paintings accompanied by a text based on my mental breakdown I had in 1969. I widely exhibited these painting, most notably at the Mexico Gallery, London, 2004.
I continued painting with a more general theme and exhibited with Outsider Artists, most recently with Wild Old Women, Novas Gallery, London 2008. In November 2012, I am to exhibit with the same group in St Pancras Crypt Gallery, London, called 'Dare to Wear'. I am a member of The Society of Art of the Imagination.

All my works are large canvases which I elaborately frame or display as hangings.

I feel that painting has lost it’s striking imagery which was so successfully used by the Surrealist and the Symbolist, and stolen by filmmakers who are having such a Renaissance with them. Chuck Close an American Photo Realist painter, said “I want to knock peoples socks off”. Well I may not have the ability to render you stockless: I would never-the-less like to have a try.


Portfolio:

Recent work

These large oil paintings were created for an exhibition named 'Dare to Wear', to be held in St. Pancras Crypt Gallery, Euston, London in November 2012.
The theme is what to wear on meeting ones after life. This was a great theme for me, once having been a dress designer, even though I do not belive in an after life! These paintings hang like a wall hanging, one 245cm. high, another 245cm. in lenght.

Daring not Wearing “Daring not Wearing”

Oil on Canvas 245cm + 160cm.
A Twist on 'Dare to Wear'