David Francey back in the Townships on a different kind of tour
It’s safe to say that David Francey is one of the better known artists in the Eastern Townships, but chances are that the three-time JUNO winner’s next show in the region is a little bit different than what people have come to expect.
Faced, in the summer of 2017, with voice issues so severe that he cut a tour short, Francey put down his microphone and picked up a paintbrush.
“My wife is a really brilliant watercolourist and she got me into painting,” the artist said, explaining that although he is best known as a singer-songwriter, he has been painting on the side for the last 25 years. “It’s been a constant source of enjoyment for me.”
Francey’s paintings, much like his music, come out of the inspiration he draws from the sweeping Canadian landscapes he has travelled over the years.
“The two disciplines really aren’t all that separate,” he said. “I really firmly believe that the same inspiration propels both of them; the feeling I get when I complete a song is exactly the same feeling I get when I finish a painting.”
Unlike his wife, Francey works in acrylics and chooses to paint in fairly muted tones. Asked about his colour choices, the singer-turned-painter said that his choices have a practical undertone; namely, that he is red-green colour blind.
“I use a limited palette because those are the colours I can see,” he said simply, adding. “If I start to mix colours I’m in deep, deep trouble.”
Laughing about the subject, Francey clarified that he always runs his works past his wife to make sure that the colours work out alright.
Francey and his work will be visiting the Gillygooly Gallery in North Hatley this weekend as the third-to-last stop on an art tour that has taken him from coast to coast. With stops only in Ottawa and Lunenburg, Nova Scotia ahead of him, the artists looks back on the experience positively while qualifying that it wasn’t really his idea.
“I’ve spent the last fifteen years being a travelling musician, so I’m used to touring and doing gigs,” he said, explaining that it was his friend Tony Girardin from the Eastern Townships who proposed the idea of doing an art tour. “It’s been a lot of fun. It’s an awful lot like doing a music tour.”
Because he is best known for his music, Francey admitted that he had been concerned that people would be disappointed by his paintings. Ultimately, however, what he has faced at each stop along his tour has been a mix of happy fans and fresh faces.
“I was expecting basically fans of the music. There’s plenty of that and I’ve very, very grateful, but then there’s this whole other section of people who’ve no idea what I did; they just saw the ad in the paper and said I want to go see this exhibition,” he said. “That felt pretty good.”
Reflecting on the tour, Francey said that although he has had more time to visit at each stop than he would have if he were performing, the bare bones of the experience haven’t been all that different.
“You just show up and see if people like it or they don’t, which is also not much different from stepping in front of a microphone,” he said, noting that his host communities were very welcoming in terms of inviting him in to do something very different than he has done before. “We were very fortunate to have those people working in our corner,” the artist added.
Although the focus of the tour has been his art, Francey said that he hasn’t given up on his voice.
“It will come back, it’s just taking much longer than I expected,” the singer said, noting that he has continued to write during his hiatus. “I was pushing it hard for a long time.”
The art tour is also serving as a launch point for Francey’s new CD, The Broken Heart of Everything, which he said he has put on for people to listen to while they look at the art at every stop.
Of particular interest for Townshippers, the singer-songwriter noted that the new album includes the song “Come Sunday,” which was written in memory of the late Tim Annesley.
“I wrote the song a long time ago, but it finally made it onto a record, so I’m very pleased about that,” Francey said, calling Annesley a good friend whose death was a “huge loss to everybody.”
More information on The Broken Heart of Everything and the David Francey Art Tour 2018 is available online at www.davidfrancey.com
“It’ll be great to be back on the townships,” Francey said. “There are so many people I want to see.”