Yvonne Mabs Francis

Yvonne Mabs Francis



About The Artist


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.