Graduating from Stoke-on-Trent College of Art (now Staffordshire University) in 1967, Chris Francis was one of the first students to qualify with a Diploma in Art & Design (subsequently BA). He did not pursue an art career but spent 30+ years in bussiness, maintaining his interest in life painting with adult education classes in his home town of Birmingham and in the London Boroughs of Tower Hamlets, Greenwich and Bexley. He also attended residential courses including the Slade Summer School.
Chris has run life drawing classes at Cavendish College (Bloomsbury), is an associate member of the United Society of Artists and has a studio in Deptford (S.E. London). His work has been exhibited at the Mall and Westminster Galleries, Well Hall Pleasance, Eltham, Hall Place Bexley and St. Alfege's Church, Greenwich.
His work involves under-painting in acrylics and then working over the images in aqueralle crayons or oil pastels using them to describe the form. Influences include the Impressionists and the post-Impressionists, Bonnard and the discipline of Coldstream, Sutherland and Uglow. Earlier works relied on pure primary colours, and working with commercial printing, he also used cyan, magenta and yellow but composition has been strongly influenced by the tightly-cropped magazine photography from his student days.