My Insecurities With Social Media

Hello everyone!

With every post, it seems like I say that I’m going to blog more often and unfortunately, end up not doing that. So I’m going to keep myself from saying that and just see how it goes, I will say that I do enjoy writing blogs and updates for you guys so we’ll see.

For this one, I want to speak about my insecurities with social media. And before I say anything on the topic, I first want to say that I was never putting a front or being false about who I am – but the fault comes when I only tend to show you guys the “better” parts of me. In retrospect, it just makes me look like a robot. It’s a tricky thing, I didn’t use to feel so pressured and affected by social media. I was unaffected by the numbers and the idea that thousands of eyes are watching everything that I say or do… until it did, and that scared me tremendously.

In all honestly, the more my audience grew, the more afraid I was to show more of who I really was because I never wanted to offend, alienate or worst, annoy anyone. And I never wanted to feel spammy with the things that I said or posted. It essentially felt like an inverse growth. In short, I didn’t want to lose them. But lately, I’ve noticed a decrease in engagement with my work. And like any human being, it made me feel disappointed and sad, so I thought: “Maybe, they’re getting tired of me. To remedy this, maybe I should go away for a little bit,” and I did, and nothing changed. So it definitely wasn’t that my audience was getting tired of me. So with that, it clicked with me to just surrender to the natural way of things and accept that social media is just a tricky thing that I’ll never truly understand, that there is no real way to ensure that our posts get the attention we believe they deserve. So I’m just going to put my best foot forward and create things that I love to create. And after an excessive amount of thought, I thought about how it was such a shitty thing it was for me to censor my opinions, my ideas, my personality, and who I genuinely am as a person. The fact is that people that wish to support me will support me and those that do not, will leave. And that is fine.

So here’s a promise to be more honest about who I am, because I am not interested in censoring myself any longer. It’s exhausting to have to hide so much. Besides, I enjoy genuinely interacting with all of you anyway, I love hearing your thoughts and comments on everything. So I hope you’re ready to go through my best and worst days. And if you disagree with any of the things that I say or post from this point onwards, feel free to unfollow. The door is wide open.

Love always,
Francis

Manhattan in February

Last February, I took a day trip to New York before everything happened.

It’s strange to hear (and see) how empty the city has become within such a short time. That being said, I hope that all of you have been staying indoors and social distancing. Make sure to stay safe and healthy everyone!

Anyway, as many of you may well know, besides painting, I also do photography. Personally, i think it’s important to delve into other hobbies completely separate from your main passion. And sometimes, when I feel like stepping away from the whole painting scene, I usually fall into my other hobbies such as writing or photography. It allows you to take a step back and it’s good practice to keep yourself from burning out.

For some time now, I’ve been shooting film. I want to say that it’s been about two years now. And more recently, I’ve been developing my own film. Although it has only been B&W film and I was only able to process it at my university. But for my birthday last month, I just asked my family for developing supplies and it took a while to complete the things that I needed, but I finally got to develop my own colored film at home. And I honestly don’t know why I waited so long because of how simple it was.

So here’s a collection of my favorite shots from the trip.

Thanks for reading everyone.

Talk to you guys soon,
Francis

THE ROAD TO "THE FOUR SEASONS"

A couple months back, I officially began working on my next piece. Coming off my show in Los Angeles back in March, I had been exhausted and burnt out from all the planning and the stress that came along with it.

Sometime in April, I initially got the idea to create a piece that had an abundance of oranges and leaves. I think I wanted the vivid colors of tangerines as something that complemented the subject. At the time, I had sketched out a portrait of a well-known singer (Chung-Ha). And at the time, I still made my sketches using pencil. But shortly after completing the sketch, I realized that painting her would strip my piece of the genuineness and sincerity that I wanted it to have. I didn't want to paint anyone just for the sake of painting them. Because of that, I lost interest in the piece and just went on to continue working on commissions and studies instead.

Eventually, I returned to the piece with a new sense of purpose. I wanted the piece to revolve around the word “Bambina,” a word that I had acquired from the third track on Vampire Weekend’s fourth LP, Father of the Bride. The Italian word “Bambina” translates to “baby girl”. In addition to the word being the title of the song, the track also includes the line, “For now, ciao, ciao, bambina”, and for some reason, that line stuck out to me and I just wanted to build something off of that. But moving onwards from this point, I knew that I wanted my new painting to embody the themes of happiness, youthfulness and hope amongst others.

As an artist, I am continuously learning new techniques and constantly trying to improve my skills. “The Four Seasons” is a good example of that. Before this piece, I did two things while painting that was detrimental to my work: I often used pencil to sketch my pieces and I did not use the dry brush blending technique. With this painting, I utilized an underpainting using a highly diluted burnt umber. I’ve found that underpaintings make my job ten times easier. It turns the sketching process from “outlining” to a more of a “sculpting” standpoint. This helped me visualize and assess the correct facial proportions for the portrait, which was what I mostly struggle with when it came to painting.

Here, you can see that I’ve begun rendering the eye and the nose area with the underpainting right below it. As you can tell, this was during the very early stage in the process where there’s barely any paint on the portrait and the nose isn’t correctly shaped yet.

With these shots, you can see the face slowly developing. In one of these shots, I’ve also begun working on the hair. This is something that I would go over countless times until I was satisfied with how it looked. Having always “rushed” hair or painted it very loosely, this was a little bit of a challenge for me. But part of the process is taking challenges head on and learning from them.

More WIP shots below:

And the final piece:

The Four Seasons
9” x 12”
Oils

MATERIALS USED:

- Winsor & Newton Oil Paint
- Gamblin Galkyd
- Gamblin Gamsol
- Assorted brushes
- DIY glass palette