Growing up in Paris, Francine Richman showed a passion and natural ability for drawing and painting from a very early age. Henryk Berlewi, noted Constructivist artist and designer, a friend of the family, painted her portrait and encouraged her to pursue a career as a painter. Her marriage to an American businessman brought her to the United States. In her years in Philadelphia and New York, she frequented museums and attended art lectures, honing her craft and vision as a painter.

In 1951, she fell in love with Montreal and decided to base herself there with her family. In the Sixties, she devoted herself to a formal study of painting and sculpture, including the lost-wax technique of casting -first at the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts and then at the School of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art. She became increasingly interested in sculpture: "The only reason I took up sculpting in the first place," she said "was so that I could improve my appreciation for the third dimension in painting." In time, however, sculpture came to replace painting as her preferred mode of expression; it seemed to be "a more complete" art form.

Richman has participated in more than forty group exhibitions, the first at the Centre d'art Mont-Royal in 1969. She won second prize in the sculpture competition held at the Centre Culturel Maisonneuve in 1970. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1973 at the Centre Lethbridge de Montreal. With her third solo exhibition (at Toronto's Daniella Gallery) behing her, she underwent (in 1978) a period of instruction in Italy with a view to improving her technical skills. For several months she immersed herself in the artists' colony in Pietrasanta, where she learned new ways of workin in bronze and marble. Returning to Canada, she presented her new work at Dominion Gallery. She was now dealing with abstract human forms-isolated or in couples- in a style that prompted the art critic Henry Lehmann to observe that her "sculpture reflects a...lyrical, painterly approach."

The sculptures she assembled for her second solo exhibition at the Dominion Gallery (1981) centered on the theme of the cosmos and celestial bodies. One of these works, "Cosmos", took its name from the title of the book by the great astronomer and writer Carl Sagan, who subsequently acquired that sculpture.

Shifting dramatically away from abstract geometric forms and returning to the figurative, Richman in the Nineties turned more consciously to the exploration of interrelatedness, developing numerous series that focused on the couple. "I am still continuing with the theme of the couple", she explained, "but I'm currently exploring more figurative aspects. I've always had a fascination with the human form, representations of connectivity, often reflecting the need of someone supporting another. At the modeling stage, I'm working now with styrofoam as the initial rather than carbing directly in wax. A different technique suggests different movements."

Richman has had her works exhibited across Canada, in the United States, and Europe and in Israel. Works of hers can be found in the permanent collections of the Dominion, West End, Michel-Ange and Shayne Galleries, in the Sher Galleries in Hallandale, Florida, as well as in many prestigious private collections worldwide. She is a member of the Sculptor's Society of Canada, Toronto.