Aug. 20, 2006 – About four months ago, after 40 years of studio work, artist David Francke decided he couldn't work indoors for another minute.
And he has not. In fact, almost any day you can find him somewhere around Frenchtown, before his easel, busily creating images of what he sees in his newly adopted neighborhood.
Saturday morning he is perched on a small stool in a little alley next to the La Petite Fenetre bar, which is across from the French Heritage Museum. He is working on an acrylic rendering of the museum, his second painting of the museum. (The first painting is for sale in the museum.)
Commissioned by the Frenchtown Civic Organization, the painting is to be ceremonially hand-delivered this week to Bruno Magras, the mayor of St. Barts. The honored courier is none other than FTCO stalwart and resident artist Allan Richardson.
"The flag isn't right," Richardson, who is supervising the project, says. The supervision is Richardson's idea. "Everybody who knows me, knows it's got to be done right. Don't you remember the colors? And it's a fishtail," he says.
Richardson shakes his head, "Every day I'm teaching him a little bit." Francke, meanwhile, continues painting, unperturbed.
"And those pigeons on the roof need more white," Richardson says.
"They're crows, Allan," Francke says.
"And the fireplug is too thin," Richardson observes.
Francke grins. "That's the fun of painting in Frenchtown," he says. "It's a pot of gold."
Hardly your notion of the solitary sensitive artist, Francke embraces kibitzers, who are becoming legion in a very short time. "I must have a campfire face," he says, "people sit around like it's a campfire."
Francke does have a sort of easygoing "campfire" persona. He is a six-foot-tall, 61-year-old with a richly bearded round face, a ready smile and silver hair topped by a handsome white panama hat.
Francke — who attended and later taught at the Corcoran School of Art and Design in Washington, D.C., and the Smithsonian Association — moved from Virginia to St. Thomas in 1983 to be with his two sons, who had moved here with his ex-wife.
His sons, now grown, are both in the artistic design field. "Moby is a painter/video game designer," Francke says. "And Dewey is a designer for Hewlett-Packard."
"I was a potter for years, before I really started painting," Francke says. The left-handed Francke indicates his large, even hammy looking, left hand. "I've injured my hand over all those years," he says. "After years and years of making pots all day, huge amounts of clay – about five tons a year – went through these hands. It's like pulling fish lines.
"Finally, one day it stopped fitting," he says, "and I became a full-time painter. And this May, I moved out of the studio. I came to Frenchtown, pulled out my easel and started painting the fishing boats. I didn't even have a stool to sit on."
Francke says, "I was always doing lots of things, always with something else in the back of my mind, a plan B. Now, I'm multitasked out. I have one plan, plan A, to paint. It fits. I get up every day, and I come out and paint," he says. "Everything else comes second. Being in the studio all the time was like living in a monastery."
The Frenchtown painter doesn't espouse any lofty ideas about painting, or about painters. He is, in fact, easily accessible, especially to his sidewalks critics. "That's my joy," he says.
"From the age of 12, I knew I wanted to be a painter. I went to an art show in Ann Arbor, Mich., where I was born, and I told this artist that I wanted to paint, and he told me to bring him one of my paintings, and he would give me one of his, and that's how it started," Francke says.
He says even at that early age he realized that he would have a hard time making a living painting alone, so he studied ceramics as a more viable livelihood.
Francke says when he was young his art-world heroes were the abstract expressionists, like Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning. "That was a long time ago," he says. "Today, I meet my heroes every day; they are the fishermen, people I meet on the street – those 70- or 75-year-old guys who walk to town three times a day selling lottery tickets."
Francke learns lessons every day from his kibitzers, he says, especially the fishermen at the Bayside. "Here's my favorite fish story," he says. "One day I was painting a lady buying some fish, and Day-Day, one of the fishermen, says, 'Where's the money?' I had painted the woman with her hands down at her sides. So, I moved her hand up holding out the cash, and it changed it. It made it work!"
According to Francke, the fishermen are quick to point out local history — things they've grown up with, that Francke doesn't know. He says, "I was painting the harbor by Hassel Island, and I'd painted what looked to me like little black dots on the water. They told me to make them stand out more." The "dots" were what's left of the pilings from the island's old Marine Railway.
"Now that I've made friends here," Francke says, "sometimes people will come to me with these old family photos about to fall apart, and ask me if I can make a painting of them. It's my biggest joy, to see them look and say, 'Yes, that's my mom and dad!'"
His painting setup is inventive, to say the least. The easel is held down by two half-filled plastic water jugs dangling from its top. The painting is attached to the easel by a piece from an orange headset. "It works," he says with satisfaction.
As he paints light white strokes on a museum window, Richardson reappears with a FTCO flag. "See these colors," he says, "and look at this," he says, shaking the flag. "I told you it was a fishtail on it." The flag flies from the museum roof, along with the French tricolor and the V.I. flag.
But Richardson isn't through. Giving the painting a hard stare, he says, "The other one was better; this looks too modern." "OK," Francke says, "I'll funk it up a bit."
Francke, frankly, enjoys Richardson, from whom he says he has learned much (if not about painting technique, then about Frenchtown).
"He is huge," Francke says with a big smile. "He told me there weren't any chickens in the painting. He was right, so I painted one in the corner, and it worked."
"These last four months have been the happiest of my life," Francke says. "Every day I meet new people, and you can't beat that."
Francke makes his own prints of his paintings, which are for sale at the museum for $15, $5 of which he donates to the museum. He can be reached at 643-3618.
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