About Francis O'Neill

Francis O’Neill was born the second of seven children (six of whom were boys) in the sunny town of Stockport, England.

When he was little his Dad, who was a teacher, decided to leave that idyllic retreat and take a job in the Solomon Islands. The family left to enjoy four years in a south sea paradise, thereby instilling in Francis his unrealistic expectations of life.

Any lingering hopes Francis had of becoming a working class hero were further dashed when he became the youngest person ever to gain entry into St.Bede’s College at the age of nine. He passed his A Levels at sixteen and faced with the prospect of working very hard for very little, or staying in bed like his brother, for not much more, Francis opted to paint pictures.

Despite the crushing awareness that anything that wasn’t football related was probably for girls, Francis went on to gain a degree in Fine Art from Edinburgh College of Art. There he learned that art lecturers could be paid a great deal for very little, and also that he should be very grateful for the strict drawing tuition he had received on his local foundation course at Stockport.

Francis then took his art degree and used it to serve up side salads and sweep floors. Had the script been better written he probably would have gone outside and sung plaintive songs to the night sky, but alas, this was Manchester and he would have got rained on and caught pneumonia. So he sang at the attic skylight when he got home until the brother who shared his room got angry and rained punches upon him.

Unsurprisingly Francis soon sallied forth to seek his fortune elsewhere. He travelled, worked, and painted in Italy, the U.S, New Zealand, Australia, Lesotho and South Africa, where, in the last of which, he found himself living in the townships and working at the Nieu Bethesda Art Centre in the Karoo desert.

On his return to the UK he finally found meaningful employment, firstly as an unpaid drawing lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, and then in year long positions at Chenderit School near Banbury, and at St.Mary’s School, Wantage, where unless people were exceptionally two-faced, he found himself to be a much loved Artist in Residence.

He also took from this employment such validation as is necessary for a sensitive soul in a creative career, which resulted in him then making the television pilot, ‘What’s So Great About Turner?’ and writing the short book ‘The Stick Man’s Guide to Life and Art.’

Francis is a natural artist. He has a tremendous flair for painting people and is an outstanding portrait painter. He has exhibited widely and is extremely well versed in his subject, having visited and studied at virtually all the major municipal art galleries in Europe, and at many others throughout the world. His extensive travels have also taken him to many sites of cultural and artistic significance outside the western tradition.

When in 2006, the Elizabeth Geenshields Foundation, a Canadian body that receives worldwide submissions from figurative painters, awarded Francis their maximum grant of $12,500, he took it to mean that he didn’t have to get a real job, so he carried on working in Oxford as a self-employed painter. He was Figure Drawing Tutor at St.Mary’s School in Wantage until its closure in 2007, but after denying all responsibility for that, he went on to produce the critically acclaimed exhibition ‘The Binsey Collection’ of 2008, which was his first fully independent one man show. The exhibition was an outstanding commercial success with paintings fetching up to £4900.

Francis was last seen riding his bike in Oxford, where he believes in magic. He looks nothing like the stick man.

Press Cuttings

Oxford Times - Binsey Collection is painter's first - Part I | Part II

Oxford Mail - Oxford band inspires artist