Frank Sinatra. A man and his art.
Everyone knows about Frank Sinatra’s legendary career as a singer and actor, however most are not aware that he was also a visual artist. Frank deeply loved art and more specifically painting. He was passionate about painting throughout his life and spent much of his free time in his study, painting.
Frank Sinatra’s pictorial work is very extensive. In his earliest paintings he dedicated enough paintings to the figure of the clown and the circus as Leitmotiv, especially from the second half of the thirty and decade of the forties. The clown’s figure was deeply linked to his childhood in Hoboken.
There were two activities with which the child Frank enjoyed. One of them was to go to the nearby New Jersey beaches and the other was the circus. They used to set up a circus in New Jersey for which the best clowns in the country paraded and Frank was in love with them and reflected in his painting.
In 1957, after a hard vital situation, related to the unfortunate life of his great friend Joe E. Lewis and the interpretation that Frank made of this character on the big screen, Frank was very affected and from that moment the smiling clowns abandon complete your pictorial work. Now it only conceives the Clown as a reflection of abandonment, loneliness, sadness and misunderstanding. It is easy to see, again, that loneliness that invaded his childhood, in his home of Hoboken, that need to lock himself in his inner world, when the exterior has given you a hard blow.
His work evolved little by little towards abstraction. In the 50s, he opted for the style he would maintain until the end of his days. “A geometric abstract style, very satisfactory to him. He is a detailed man, so he enjoys the precision required by thorough forms, ”said Tina.
In the 1980s he began to give another approach to his art. His work since then, already in the 1990s it was more clearly influenced by the bright colors and abstract shapes of Mark Rothko, Robert Mangold and Ellsworth Kelly, within his style fully focused on abstraction.
It is said that his work has been very private, and that he painted only for pleasure, for love and in a very introspective way.
Frank was very sensitive to lights and shadows. For him the bright colors enhanced his life. His favorite was the orange color, for him it was the happiest color and thus captured it in one of his canvases. He was a visionary when perceiving the beauty that surrounded him. And that manifests itself in his works.
The first vision that the public had of his work was in 1991, when he published a book about his art, “Frank Sinatra:” A Man and His Art “, which included an introduction of his daughter, Tina.
Among Frank’s early paintings, is the curious paint of a dog. It was owned by Ava Gardner. The painting is described as follows: “Oil on canvas, signed in the lower right corner, F. Sinatra. It dates from around 1950, when the Sinatra / Gardner love story began and was a gift from Frank to Ava.”
On his way of creating, the singer confessed to “Man and His Art” that he liked to paint quickly and not delay, because he preferred that each canvas express the same mood. And he had a tendency to change humor quickly.
There is a great passion and seriousness in his art. He faced the canvas with the same enthusiasm as to all his artistic ambitions.
Sinatra was a man in love with art throughout his life. Painting was his passion and refuge. A release to recharge energy. He loved that loneliness that the brushes gave him in his study.
But, above all, Sinatra’s works are human, intimate. They show us a man who does something he loves deeply, and does so with the same love, trust and his own style that he always printed on all the facets of his art.
Article written and provided by Rosa García Mora. https://www.facebook.com/rosa.garciamora.12
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