About Francesca Salvini

Francesca Salvini paints because there are moments she wants to keep. Light moving across a hillside. The edge where sky meets land. Something briefly coming together before it changes again.

She paints in North Yorkshire, drawn especially to the moors and the feeling of being both alone and connected to the world around her. Back in the studio, plaster, stone chips, gathered soil, peat and seed heads become part of the painting’s first layers, anchoring her intention in the surface.

Working with oil, acrylic, ink, spray paint, charcoal, pastel and raw pigments, she looks for edges in the materials themselves: where oil and water resist one another, where colour bleeds, where a dry mark interrupts wet paint. She wants to keep the energy of those encounters as the painting develops.

Sometimes, what happens on the surface makes her want to stop everything and hold it there. But the paint moves, dries and changes. She has to decide what to keep and what to let go. Some marks remain in the finished work; others are washed away, scraped back or buried.

Photography allows her to keep something of these passing moments. She photographs the paintings as she works, recording what might otherwise be forgotten. For her, a painting is a collection of moments, some still visible, others held beneath the surface.

Following the loss of her husband in 2024, painting became a way of reconnecting with the world. The desire to hold onto something, while knowing it will change, runs quietly through her work.

August

What the landscape doesn’t show

I never try to paint what I see—only how it feels. The colours I reach for, the marks I make, are shaped by memory, movement, and mood. The landscape might offer a horizon, a shadow, or a shift in light—but I’m more interested in the atmosphere it leaves behind.

What stays with me isn’t the shape of a hill or the curve of a path. It’s the feeling of wind pressing against my back, the weight of a grey sky, the silence that settles just before rain. The view is just the starting point. What ends up on the canvas is something remembered, reimagined, and sometimes completely undone.

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July

The chaos before the calm

People often ask if my studio is peaceful. Not always. There’s paper everywhere, brushes left in tea cups, and a floor that’s half covered in footprints and paint splatters. Most days, there’s at least one half-finished painting propped against the wall that I’m trying not to overthink.

But I’ve come to realise that the mess is part of it. The clutter, the chaos, the not-quite-knowing—it all plays a role. That’s where the looseness comes from. That’s where the unexpected happens. The magic doesn’t arrive when everything’s tidy. It shows up in the middle of it all.

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June

Sketchbooks I never show

My sketchbooks are full of half-ideas—loose marks, quick colour tests, things that didn’t quite work but might lead somewhere else. They’re not made to be pretty. They’re rough, unfinished, and often messy, but that’s exactly why they matter.

This is where I try things out without pressure. Where accidents spark new directions. A torn edge, a scribbled note, a colour combination I’d never have planned—these are the seeds of future work. Sometimes what begins as a throwaway page becomes the start of a whole new painting.

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