--- title: "Mark Francis isn't painting a waveform. He keeps its rhythm and accidents" locale: "en" url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/mark-francis-sound-as-grammar-en" markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/mark-francis-sound-as-grammar-en.md" category: "creative" tags: ["painting", "sound", "abstraction", "creative process", "Mark Francis"] published_at: "2026-08-28T10:28:00.000Z" author: "Manon Girard" translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/mark-francis-son-comme-grammaire-fr.md" --- # Mark Francis isn't painting a waveform. He keeps its rhythm and accidents Chroma talks about frequency, echo and resonance. But the sources document no audio-to-colour converter: Mark Francis uses sound more like a grammar for rhythm, repetition, interruption and chance. Say **Mark Francis turns sound into painting** and a neat diagram appears immediately: audio file on the left, canvas on the right, helpful arrow in between. The paintings are less cooperative. Read the *Chroma* text and older interviews and the imaginary cable disappears. Francis absolutely talks about frequency, echo, pulse and resonance.[1](https://www.designboom.com/art/mark-francis-sound-art-frequency-vibrating-abstract-paintings/)[2](https://bernhardknaus.com/en/exhibitions/mark-francis-chroma~e18710) What nobody supplies is the legend that would turn the canvas into a graph: this frequency equals this yellow; this sound produces this line. Sound behaves more like **grammar**: repetition, pulse, layering, interruption, anomaly. Enough structure to start a painting, not enough authority to survive wet paint unchanged. > **Two ways to paint data** > - An input value maps to shape, colour or position according to a reproducible rule.: Encoding > - The source domain provides rhythm, repetition, breaks and vocabulary without requiring a one-to-one correspondence.: Grammar > The sources on Francis clearly document the second logic; they publish no audio-to-colour conversion table. ## The pulse stays Sound did not arrive for the 2026 press release. In 2023 Francis was already looking back across decades and identifying it as one of the patterns that kept returning.[5](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2023/10/14/irish-artist-mark-francis-these-prints-are-pieces-in-their-own-right-just-as-important-as-a-big-painting/) His description of a surface is wonderfully plain: a **pulse**, then something aberrant inside the pulse.[5](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2023/10/14/irish-artist-mark-francis-these-prints-are-pieces-in-their-own-right-just-as-important-as-a-big-painting/) Music also gets in through titles. He listens across classical, punk, heavy metal, techno, industrial dance and ambient, and says work titles are often influenced by whatever he is hearing in the studio.[5](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2023/10/14/irish-artist-mark-francis-these-prints-are-pieces-in-their-own-right-just-as-important-as-a-big-painting/) The titles preserve that listening: *Sequential Pulse*, *Cadence*, *Dub Echo*, *Reverb Mix*. *Sound Field* is there in 2022, *Sequencer* in 2023, *Subtonic* and *Sea of Sound* in 2024.[4](https://www.kerlingallery.com/exhibitions/mark-francis18)[7](https://www.kerlingallery.com/artists/mark-francis) By the time *Chroma* arrives, the vocabulary has already spent years in the paintings. > Illustration: Sound Field by Mark Francis, 2022, a tall abstract painting. Sound Field (2022), oil on canvas, 275 × 214 cm. The sonic title predates Chroma by four years. Credit: [Mark Francis / Kerlin Gallery](https://www.kerlingallery.com/artists/mark-francis). Kerlin described *Acoustic Oceans* in 2024 as paintings where binary sequences and data become pulsing bands of colour, while Francis compared their construction to improvised abstract noise that can be melodic and chaotic.[4](https://www.kerlingallery.com/exhibitions/mark-francis18) His own studio site speaks of colour and “sound data”, with hues carrying information.[3](https://www.markfrancisstudio.com/about/) So “data” is fair. The conversion table is not there, and inventing one on Francis’s behalf would be a fairly odd form of criticism. ## No decoder Designboom says Francis “visualizes sound and frequency”.[1](https://www.designboom.com/art/mark-francis-sound-art-frequency-vibrating-abstract-paintings/) On its own, that verb promises quite a machine. A few lines later the same piece gets more exact: the paintings **suggest** echoes and layered frequencies without literally illustrating them.[1](https://www.designboom.com/art/mark-francis-sound-art-frequency-vibrating-abstract-paintings/) Bernhard Knaus Fine Art uses similar language. Colour behaves as an acoustic phenomenon; lines recall oscillation and echo; Francis gives sound form through movement, intensity and rhythm.[2](https://bernhardknaus.com/en/exhibitions/mark-francis-chroma~e18710) The gallery also says his starting structures can resemble networks, cellular systems and scientific models before they gradually dissolve during painting.[2](https://bernhardknaus.com/en/exhibitions/mark-francis-chroma~e18710) Almost everything hangs on the verb **recall**. With an actual encoding you can ask a boring but useful question: if the input changes and the rule stays fixed, what changes in the image? The texts here cannot answer it. No published mapping from frequency to pigment, waveform to length, loudness to density. Nothing has necessarily failed. It is simply a different kind of borrowing. ## Wet deadline His painting process adds another constraint with nothing digital about it: drying time. The harshest constraint is almost disappointingly ordinary: paint dries. Francis told *The Irish Times* he works **one painting at a time** in a very systematic process.[5](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2023/10/14/irish-artist-mark-francis-these-prints-are-pieces-in-their-own-right-just-as-important-as-a-big-painting/) Once the surface dries too far, that way of working is gone. He has even put plastic in front of a painting to slow the air.[5](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2023/10/14/irish-artist-mark-francis-these-prints-are-pieces-in-their-own-right-just-as-important-as-a-big-painting/) *Chroma* supplies the other half: the composition is prepared, then often painted **alla prima**.[2](https://bernhardknaus.com/en/exhibitions/mark-francis-chroma~e18710) The plan enters the studio; the wet surface is allowed to disobey it. > **Four tensions in the method** > - Prepare a structure: grid, sequence, network, rhythm or another starting system.: 1 > - Work inside a material window: wet paint imposes its own clock.: 2 > - Repeat enough to establish a readable pulse.: 3 > - Let a break, smear or aberration stop repetition becoming mechanical.: 4 > For Francis, the system starts the painting; it does not decide the final state alone. That wet deadline makes rhythm physical in the studio. The motif may pulse, but the painter is also working against a material clock. ## Accident since 1989 Chance did not arrive with the sonic theme. Francis says that around **1989** he made monotypes and then wondered how to carry their visual qualities into paintings. He smoothed canvases with a spatula and brought rollers and other printmaking tools into painting to reproduce a related surface.[5](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2023/10/14/irish-artist-mark-francis-these-prints-are-pieces-in-their-own-right-just-as-important-as-a-big-painting/) He says that process has run through his practice ever since. Monotype suited him because a one-off image keeps its accidents.[5](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2023/10/14/irish-artist-mark-francis-these-prints-are-pieces-in-their-own-right-just-as-important-as-a-big-painting/) Plate, ink and pressure can be prepared; lifting the paper still returns something that was not fully negotiable in advance. Seen from 1989, *Chroma* feels less like a new theory attached to striped paintings. Control and accident were already built into a practice where printmaking taught Francis that a prepared system could hand back something he had not ordered. > Illustration: Subtonic by Mark Francis, 2024, vertical coloured bands. Subtonic (2024), oil on aluminium, 122 × 153 cm. The bands are highly ordered, while their boundaries and overlaps keep the system from reading like a simple graph. Credit: [Mark Francis / Kerlin Gallery](https://www.kerlingallery.com/exhibitions/mark-francis18). The *Irish Times* review of *Acoustic Oceans* describes stacked bands of vertical lines whose divisions are blurred with brushwork. The eye struggles to settle which layer is in front, and compressed lines create visual noise.[6](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/review/2024/07/23/mark-francis-acoustic-oceans-review-a-fascinating-development-in-the-irish-artists-decades-spanning-career/) That is a perceptual mechanism, not merely a theme announced by the title card. ## Copy a relation The useful recipe is not “pick a song and paint it”. Without a mapping rule, that sounds more like a cheerful Sunday workshop than a method. A sturdier move is to steal **relationships instead of shapes**. The vocabulary is easy to list: frequency/interval, pulse/break, signal/noise, repetition/echo, layer/reverb. None of that requires a canvas to look like Ableton. One band returns, another shifts the beat, a gap breaks the run, neighbouring colours nearly beat against each other. Painting then gets to remain painting: viscosity, tools, drying time, mistakes and all. It does not become an analogue monitor for imaginary software. > **Borrow without illustrating** > - Draw a waveform, spectrogram or notes: the source sound stays visually recognizable.: Copy the shape > - Import repetition, cadence, echo, density or interruption, then let paint reinterpret them.: Copy the relation > The second strategy better matches the available evidence on Francis and lets the destination medium keep its own constraints. ## Science starts it Sound is only half of this machinery. The other half comes from science. In the 1990s he looked at disease and cells. Later came radio astronomy, dark matter, networks and crystalline structures.[5](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2023/10/14/irish-artist-mark-francis-these-prints-are-pieces-in-their-own-right-just-as-important-as-a-big-painting/)[2](https://bernhardknaus.com/en/exhibitions/mark-francis-chroma~e18710) Kerlin summarizes his work as painting fed by what scientific technology makes visible: electron microscopy, seismic patterns and sonic data gathered from space.[7](https://www.kerlingallery.com/artists/mark-francis) *Chroma* actually calls those structures **catalysts**.[2](https://bernhardknaus.com/en/exhibitions/mark-francis-chroma~e18710) They start the painting and then lose their original context. What survives is the trace of a system, not its legend. That qualification matters when “data-driven” can make almost any intuition smell faintly of a laboratory. Francis borrows systems from science and sound that are strong enough to start a composition, then permits those systems to lose authority during execution. > Illustration: Sea of Sound by Mark Francis, 2024, large abstract composition of coloured bands. Sea of Sound (2024), oil on canvas, 214 × 274 cm. Sound was already functioning as visual vocabulary two years before Chroma. Credit: [Mark Francis / Kerlin Gallery](https://www.kerlingallery.com/exhibitions/mark-francis18). ## Frequency suggests “Painting sound” still works as shorthand if it means pulse, frequency, resonance, noise and listening. If it makes you imagine an audio signal mechanically converted and copied to canvas, it describes a pipeline the sources never show. The available sources do not show that second pipeline. They show something less demonstrative: a prepared structure, vocabulary borrowed from other disciplines, paint that has to be worked before it dries, and enough accident to stop the structure surviving intact. Sound does not hand Francis an answer to copy. It gives him **questions that paint is allowed to answer badly**. ## References 1. [Designboom — Mark Francis visualizes sound and frequency in Chroma exhibition, August 27, 2026](https://www.designboom.com/art/mark-francis-sound-art-frequency-vibrating-abstract-paintings/) 2. [Bernhard Knaus Fine Art — Mark Francis: Chroma, September 4 – November 21, 2026](https://bernhardknaus.com/en/exhibitions/mark-francis-chroma~e18710) 3. [Mark Francis Studio — About](https://www.markfrancisstudio.com/about/) 4. [Kerlin Gallery — Mark Francis: Acoustic Oceans, 2024](https://www.kerlingallery.com/exhibitions/mark-francis18) 5. [The Irish Times — Mark Francis interview, October 14, 2023](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/2023/10/14/irish-artist-mark-francis-these-prints-are-pieces-in-their-own-right-just-as-important-as-a-big-painting/) 6. [The Irish Times — Acoustic Oceans review, July 23, 2024](https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art/review/2024/07/23/mark-francis-acoustic-oceans-review-a-fascinating-development-in-the-irish-artists-decades-spanning-career/) 7. [Kerlin Gallery — Mark Francis artist page](https://www.kerlingallery.com/artists/mark-francis)