How Artist Emma Francis is Capturing Emotional Chaos Through Figurative Paintings

Emma Francis is a figurative artist from Vancouver based in Montreal. In this interview, she talks about her move from Vancouver to Montreal, her challenges with mental health, and how these experiences shape her work. She shares insights into her creative process, what inspires her, and how she finds meaning in painting. Emma also discusses her passion for creating art, thoughts on knowing when a piece is done, and exciting plans for future projects.

Emma Francis is a figurative painter primarily concerned with exploring personal and social anxieties in the face of our changing environmental and societal landscapes. Born in Vancouver, BC, Francis received their diploma in Fine Arts from Langara College before receiving their BFA in Studio Arts at Concordia University. While attending, their work was included in various exhibitions, including xxxxxxxx*8 at Galerie Popop and Chic Mate at The Mitten Factory. Recently, their work was exhibited in the online exhibition By Land or By Sea, curated by Pretty Girls Making Cool Shit, and is currently shown in Endless Dreams, curated by Artsin Square. Their work has recently been featured in I Like Your Work magazine and Arts to Hearts’ Studio Visit Book Volume 3. Emma Francis currently lives in Montreal, Quebec.

In Emma’s art practice, she explores subjective experiences of emotions, transformations, and madness. She is interested in the tension and fluctuations between rational and irrational selves. Her anxieties concerning the human capacity for destruction and the shifting states of agency and power also influence her work. These issues’ personal, subjective, and intimate nature drives her to create works emphasizing colour, mood, and symbolism over likeness or realism while focusing on the human figure and narrative figurative compositions. As a painter, Emma leans toward the expressive and surreal, blurring the line between internal psychological landscapes and embodied existence.

Her process involves digitally manipulating, layering, and collaging found photographic material until it is entirely transformed into a new image and composition. She then uses these as reference images in her paintings. This appropriation and radical transformation of found imagery create a visual interconnectivity between the external world and her internal thought processes.

For Emma, the act of painting is very reflective and sometimes almost confessional, though opaque. Through her work, her lived reality as a queer artist with mental illness is in dialogue with her background in art history and religious studies and the ways madness and queerness have been portrayed in the West. The charged contemporary climate surrounding identity politics, social injustice, and environmental injustice also permeates her thoughts and experiences. Her work is unsettling in its focus on the emotionally apocalyptic, both catastrophic and revelatory.

1. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

I’m originally from Vancouver, BC, but gentrification drove me eastward to Montreal. I miss the gloomy weather and the beauty of the West Coast, but not the rent. Growing up, I was lucky enough to be surrounded by many artistically creative adults and felt drawn to writing and visual arts. Unfortunately, I had a very difficult childhood and adolescence. Mental illness, addiction, abuse, and death overshadowed any personal ambitions I had until I was in my mid-twenties when I started weekly therapy and then, several months later, art school. After finishing a BFA, most people seem to find some initial success and community, maybe pursue an MFA, or they sort of put art on the back burner indefinitely. I couldn’t quite decide on any of those things. I worked in total isolation and just shy of abject poverty for years, unwilling to deprioritize art but also unwilling to put myself out there. I was so afraid of rejection that I didn’t apply for anything for seven years. Now, I’ve realized that loneliness is much worse than rejection, and the process – not the result – is where purpose is found.

My own anxieties concerning the human capacity for destruction and our shifting states of agency and power also influence my work.

Emma Francis

2. What inspired you to become an artist?

I actually thought for a long time I’d be a writer, not a visual artist. I think it was the practice of being an artist that I was drawn to more than anything. With writing, I could never develop any sort of consistent practice. I’d write seven poems weekly but nothing for six months. Sitting down with a blank page often felt daunting and boring. With art, I never had that problem. It’s funny because I’d say originally I had more innate talent with writing than with visual arts, but in the end, that talent didn’t matter because I couldn’t consistently show up. With painting, I love showing up. I love doing the work, even if, in the end, I don’t always love the work itself. It’s so rare, I think, to find something where you love the journey, the process. Once I did, I couldn’t give that up

3. Can you tell us about a particular piece of art that holds special meaning for you?

Picasso’s “Blue Nude.” When I was a kid, my parents had a framed print of it hanging in their bedroom. I loved it. I found it so sad, beautiful, and mysterious. For some reason, I always associated the model with my father. Maybe the melancholy combined with my dad being a pretty skinny guy when he was young. I still have the same framed print and frame hanging in my home now.

4. How do you know when a piece of art is finished?

This is tricky. In my experience with painting, I’d say it’s better to undercook than slightly overcook. You want to keep things fresh. I struggle with this a lot. I tend to overwork pieces and get too finicky too quickly. If I think a piece might be finished, I’ll step away from it for a while. Distance usually helps with perspective on a work. However, a part of me feels a painting isn’t finished until it’s sold or hung in an exhibition, in which case it’s finished because I can’t work on it anymore. Whistler added finishing touches to a painting on a whim the same day it was to be exhibited. Ideally, an art piece is in dialogue with other art, history, and the contemporary moment, making art a living thing. So perhaps no piece of art is finished or born.

5. Are there any upcoming exhibitions or projects you’re particularly excited about?

I’m currently trying to secure grant funding for a body of work that incorporates narratives and archetypes of Christian eschatology, cosmogony, and Greco-Roman earth mother goddesses and recontextualizes both within our current ecological crisis. If I can, I plan on spending all of 2025 on this. I’d like to create a body of work involving more figurative complexity, narration, and larger-scale paintings.

As a painter I lean toward the expressive and surreal, blurring the line between internal psychological landscapes and our embodied existence.

Emma Francis

Emma Francis is Capturing Emotional Chaos Through Figurative Paintings’s art journey is a powerful personal growth and creative exploration story. Her work, shaped by her life experiences and struggles, offers a unique view into emotional and societal issues. As Emma continues to explore new ideas and techniques, her dedication to expressing deep, complex feelings through her art remains clear. To learn more about Emma, click on the links below.