Born in San Mateo, California, Francis enlisted in the US Army Air Corps in 1943 and began painting therapeutically after a plane crash put him in a body cast. Graduating from the University of California with an MFA in 1950, he moved to Paris where he studied briefly at the Académie Fernand Léger and held his first one-man show in 1952 at the Galerie du Dragon. The critic Clement Greenberg grouped him with the Abstract Expressionists, in spite of his physical absence from the movement's hotbeds in the United States. A New York Times review of his 1950s paintings describes them as “shimmering crepuscular monochromes […] in which rounded repeating brushstrokes create a multi-celled or honeycombed surface while also resembling a Mark Rothko color cloud in the process of disintegration.” By the end of his life he was living in California again. “Los Angeles is the best for me for light in my work. New York light is hard. Paris light is a beautiful cerulean gray. But Los Angeles light is clear and bright even in haze.”
