Sam Francis was an American artist known for his exuberantly colorful, large-scale abstract paintings. His practice incorporated elements from Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Impressionism, and Eastern philosophy to create a unique style of painterly abstraction. Influenced by Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, he is more closely associated to the work of Helen Frankenthaler, as he was more interested in the formal arrangement of the picture plane than the expressivity of the individual artist. “Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment,” he once reflected. Born on June 25, 1923 in San Mateo, CA, he briefly served in the US Air Force during World War II but was injured during a test flight. Returning to California, he received his BA and MA from UC Berkeley in botany and psychology before beginning to pursue a career in art. The artist traveled widely during his career, and he was closely aligned with the Art Informel movement while living abroad in Paris during the 1950s. Francis died on November 4, 1994 in Santa Monica, CA at the age of 71. He was a founding trustee of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and his paintings can be found numerous museums.
He began his artistic career in a body cast at age 21, and died at 71 of cancer, working with the utmost difficulty—using only his left hand and strapped to a wheelchair. Yet of all the great American abstract impressionists, Sam Francis’ work is perhaps the most joyous.
“The personal lives of American painters are tragic…and inevitable. And do not explain the artist,” said Sam Francis, who was as articulate with words as he was with ink and paint. But often, the work itself does. Although he traveled the world with and for his art, for much of his life he based himself in Santa Monica. He loved the Southland’s light, “clear, bright, even through the haze.”
The Bay-Area borne Francis took to abstract impressionism as fast as he learned to paint in Paris after 1950 under the GI Bill. Within months, he was one of the best known—and best-accepted--of the wild new generation of American modern painters that included Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. By the mid-`50s, Time magazine acclaimed him the most popular US painter in Paris. He was doing murals for major New York banks. Yet, unlike some of his compeers, he was evolving constantly, finding new forms, new textures, even formulating new paints for his scalene bubbles of joy.
“You go as far as you can, as fast as you can,” he wrote. But he rarely interpreted his work: “Paintings are my thinking,” he said. “Not about anything.” But the viewer may find his or her own feelings, memories, thoughts, hopes and fear drawn out by their surfaces with their shapes of what were sometimes called “insistent biomorphic forms,” bright, evocative colored areas that hit you like animated Rorschach blobs. This isn’t the cooler, alienated work of the later East Coast expressionists. Francis’ pictures are brilliant, emotive, alive, engaging. He said, “They perform the unique mathematics of my imagination.”
Unlike his popular and widely distributed lithographs, which he cranked out with great rapidity in his Santa Monica Litho Shop, Inc., Francis took his time with his big paintings. Sometimes, however, they form a tight historical sequence—like the “Blue Ball” series of 50 years ago, imagined as he lay ill with severe kidney disease in a Swiss hospital. There, round shapes hung before his vision, “A hell-like paradise of blue balls,” he later wrote. By the end of the paintings’ sequence, the “balls” begin to look like intricate extraterrestrial devices. Representational, perhaps, but of nothing on earth.
Then, as earlier and later, he tried to use his art to paint away his disease, his pain. Only in the very end, when he was crippled by advanced prostate cancer, did it fail him. But the pictures he did in his last months, with their new submarine greens and early sunrise reds, exceed in their imagination anything he’d done before.
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