Francie Lyshak was born in 1948 in Detroit, during the glory days of Motown. She was raised by her grandmother, a musician, and her mother, a librarian, to have a great appreciation for music, literature, the visual arts, philosophy and science. She had two formative experiences viewing paintings. On those occasions, she felt deeply moved and unfettered from her feelings of isolation. Under these influences, she traveled to Paris to study painting. She returned to study fine arts at Wayne State University and graduated with a BFA. Later she became a licensed Art Therapist with an MPS and worked at a psychiatric hospital to help children and teens to recover from their traumas by helping them to employ the visual arts for self-expression and self-soothing.
At that time she didn’t remember that she herself was a victim of childhood trauma. Her early paintings were tableau vivants, with scenes of danger that she didn’t understand. It took her many years to discover that she had been violated both as a child and as an adolescent. After this discovery, she compiled her early paintings into a picture book about trauma recovery (The Secret: Art & Healing from Sexual Abuse, Safer Society Press, Brandon, VT, 1999I). In this way, she was able to put her trauma behind her and move away from narrative painting.
Lyshak’s painting practice was profoundly influenced by her fellow artists, musicians, actors, dancers, scholars and writers in the East Village, NYC. She was a Second Wave feminist who created emotionally and psychologically-loaded paintings, in rebellion against the restrained intellectualism that was fashionable in the visual arts during the 70’s and 80’s. She later documented her arts community online – as they battled homophobia, the AIDS epidemic and Reganism, all the while witnessing the rise and fall of the East Village arts community. (https://francielyshak.com/bar-00_intro/)
Her work became increasingly abstract. Her abstractions though, like her narrative paintings, were always filled with emotion; but they became unburdened by chronic distress. Now she paints with the most minimal use of tools and materials. Her latest works are of pure emotions defined by color and texture in the simplest possible visual language.
Her paintings have been shown in galleries, juried exhibitions and museums. Her work is in private and museum collections in the United States and in Europe. She has broken the rules of traditional painting by incorporating the sculptural aspects of her materials using minimalist terms, while retaining a focus on the emotional power of color, gesture and texture, along with the naked honesty and authenticity of her message.
