Untitled (SF94-043), 1994

"Untitled (SF94-043)" is an acrylic on paper laid on panel painting created by Sam Francis in 1994. The artwork is estate stamped on verso. The artwork ships framed in a contemporary closed-corner gold leaf frame and has a framed size of 22.5 x 26.5".

The heart and soul of Sam Francis’s artwork expresses itself in color and light, an art aligned more with the Color Field movement than with the Abstract Expressionists with which he is often associated with. William C. Agee describes this driving force in Francis’s work as “the expressive and psychic power of color.” Agee points out that in contrast to the perception of color field painting as emotionless and “decorative,” Francis’s art, which was “an art of color conceived as light and air and space, was born of sustained and recurring pain and illness.” Perhaps due to a history of terrible events and circumstances throughout his life, Francis became someone who thrived on chaos and change. Nothing was certain in life and Francis went beyond mere acceptance of that fact to embracing it. He was a man whose unceasing confrontation with, and exploration of his emotional life fueled his creative drive and guided his artistic growth from beginning to end.

Technically, Francis was an experimenter with no regard for the rules of paints or printing presses. Oil, watercolor, printer’s ink, and acrylic - it was all the same; he used any color, opacity, and consistency that spoke to him to create his vision. Dan Cytron, Francis’s studio assistant for three decades, created many of the paints which Francis used. He would scour the world finding the right pigments and mixing the paints himself in order to achieve the clean brilliant colors Francis demanded. In printmaking, Francis was a committed innovator, driven by a deep curiosity reminiscent of Picasso. His love of collaboration led to his involvement with several key print workshops through the last decades of his life. He also founded his own atelier, The Litho Shop, where he could work at his own pace, without interruption. These opposing techniques, the singular and collaborative, produced key achievements, both technical and aesthetic, in monotypes, lithography and aquatints.

In 1994, nearing the end of his days, Francis produced an intense and profound series of paintings. He produced with such vivaciousness and vigor that one could easily mistake the paintings for the work of a man much younger than the ailing artist. And yet, a less experienced man could never have been responsible for such knowing use of paint and control of the canvas. Francis knew his medium like it was a part of his being, color reflective of his emotions, and the brush used with such deftness of touch as to infer an extension of him.