Fearlessly Authentic Modern Primitive Self-Taught Human Being

Francis X. Donovan. Sculptor. Painter. A man of, by, and for the people. Charlestown kid, longshoreman’s son, who landed on the other corner of the country and stayed. He built his life around the work early and never looked back. Fifty years of mornings, one building on Roeder and C, two dogs, and a door that stays open.

He and his wife Tota drove into Bellingham on a road trip on a Friday. By Sunday morning they had put an offer on a house. They have lived in it for thirty odd years. That is more or less how he does everything.

Nobody taught him. No school for it, no apprenticeship, no waiting for permission. He worked for a living the whole way through, a travel agent in the seventies while Tota was with Pan Am, t-shirt designs and side jobs when they were needed. The art was never the fallback. It was the thing the rest of it was arranged around.

Ask him what modern primitive means and he will tell you he is pre computer. A go getter who gets done what needs doing. No software, no shortcuts, no waiting for the right conditions. Oil on canvas, oil stick, carved wood, paper, whatever is in reach and whatever the piece is asking for.

The images come from what he has seen, or what he made of what he saw, or what turns up once the painting starts telling him something back. He works to the classics. The art evolves with him and he lets it.

Studio X is where all of it happens. Twenty odd years in the same room and every inch of that building is covered. Canvases stacked in the closets, work on every wall, decades of it. The door is usually open and all sorts of people come through. Some buy something, some just look, some stay an hour. He prefers it that way. Art can be the way home, he says, and he means it about whoever walks in as much as about himself.