{Artist Inspiration} Francine Turk

Familiar with the brilliant work of

Chicago fine artist Francine Turk?

Most of the pieces here are from

Next Level BadAss, created as a tribute

to the legacy of Miles Davis.

Francine Turk gained attention in the early ’90s with

a series of soulful charcoal nudes.

The portraits arrived in the midst of her emotional

turmoil, self-discovery and excavation.

Turk’s charcoal nudes left their mark and were

featured in the films The Breakup and

Fathers and Daughters and the the TV series

Empire.

Francine is an art school dropout who

exhibits internationally and has been featured

in private celebrity and corporate collections

throughout the U.S. and Europe.

Turk works in a variety of mediums and draws

upon classical historical art forms as well as

contemporary pop imagery.

The artist was hand picked by the family

and executors of the Miles Davis estate

to create work as a tribute to the legacy

of legendary virtuoso Miles Davis.

In 2015, the fine art vault of Miles Davis

was opened to her and in it, she discovered

Davis’s most personal and intimate possessions:

catalogues of casual drawings, paintings and

musings that reveal a side of Davis that few ever knew.

Next Level BadAss/Miles Davis & Francine Turk

is a bold, genre-busting tribute to Davis’s creative

genius that was unveiled in an exhibition in 2016,

timed to commemorate what would have been

Davis’s 90th birthday and the 25th anniversary

of his death.

From her website’s bio we learn:
“Francine Turk is the Guardian of the Preservation
of the Sacred Creative. She is a fine artist and
documentarian; a classicist and a nonconformist.
she is an advocate for safeguarding artifacts and
icons that have made a cultural and historical impact.
None of her bodies of work are like the other but all
of them are interconnected by one common thread–
preservation–which lives at the center of her art.”

Francine Turk has partnered with Lapchi, one of the world’s
most luxurious and sustainably made hand-woven carpets
(Francine Turk for Lapchi Collection) which is part of
an open-ended series incorporating the artist’s signature
series Love Letters to a Matador, Love Letters to Paris
and Paris Noir, into four distinct carpets crafted from
wool, linen, and silk.

I’m such an admirer of the art of Francine Turk
and plan to attend the reveal of the Lapchi collection
in Chicago…meet me back here soon so
I can share the inside scoop!

Peace to you right where you are.

~michele