Sam Francis (1923-1994)

‘I am fascinated by gravity. I like to fly, to soar, to float like a cloud, but I am tied down to place… Painting is a way in and out.’
–Sam Francis

Sam Francis’s lush work on paper Untitled, 1970 suggests a boundless, kaleidoscopic space where jewel-tones orbit a vast white expanse. Loosely spiralled around the centre are large splashes of red, purple, navy blue and translucent green. At the top, a yellow daub glows like a sun. Francis’s colours have a luxurious chromatic intensity. To achieve his effect, he layered thin coats of acrylic paint to create rich tones while still maintaining a watercolour-like delicacy. As Francis wrote, ‘Colour is light on fire. Each colour is the result of burning, for each substance burns with a particular colour’ (S. Francis quoted in J. Butterfield, Sam Francis, exh. cat., Los Angeles, 1980, pp. 9-10).Indeed, Untitled shimmers like the sea’s surface, a sublime dance of light on water.

Untitled presents a shift away from Francis’s paintings of the late 1960s; these compositions were dominated by a large, forceful white which threatens to overtake the narrow muted strip of a boarder. Instead of a hard edge, Untitled is softer and less rigid, the colours and the white coexisting harmoniously. The work possesses what curator Peter Selz called ‘an area of silence…characterized by a unique weightlessness’ perhaps resulting from its vertical orientation (P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York, Inc., 1975, p. 103). Like the ocean’s tides, the colours and white ebb and flow evenly, balanced forces united on paper.