SAM FRANCIS

Born in 1923 in California, Francis, originally committed to a career in medicine, began to paint as part of his occupational therapy while recovering from back injuries sustained in a plane crash during Army Air Corps training in 1943. In 1950, Francis moved to Paris and enrolled at Fernand Léger’s private academy. Francis called Paris the “Mother of my own psyche”; he was captivated by the changing light and immersed himself in the study of Monet’s Water Lilies, Matisse, and Bonnard. This period spent in Paris was transformative for Francis, who is regarded as a leading interpreter of colour and light.

A true internationalist, Francis travelled extensively and was a resident of France and Japan for nearly a decade. He was fluent in the languages of both countries. Eclectic in his influences, his work holds multiple references, including to French impressionism, abstract expressionism, colour field painting, Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, and his own Californian roots. Francis had an insatiable appetite for life with many and varied interests, including Jungian analysis and Eastern philosophy. It was these interests that partly led to his use of negative space; he saw this blankness as a silent place of Zen for the viewer. Furthermore, this device is frequently used by Chinese and Japanese artists and Francis would have been influenced by this.

Dedicated to his fourth wife, is To Mako, 1965 is one of six Edge paintings in the exhibition. In this series, the colour is forced to the edge of the painting, compelling the viewer to contemplate the whiteness and indeed one’s own self.

Francis worked in various media, including on canvas, paper and print, but it is arguably on paper where he excelled. He worked prolifically and experimentally, employing the natural properties of the paper, the absorbency and luminosity of which allowed him with energetic gestures or considered mark-making to exploit the riot of colour so characteristic of his work. He is quoted as saying that ‘colour is light on fire’. Francis rarely employed black in his work.

The Blue Balls series is a central part of Francis’s oeuvre; it consists of deeply personal works, an exploration of intense colour, space, and organic forms stemming from his suffering from a painful medical condition. Although throughout his life he suffered from many painful illnesses, he retained an enormous joie de vivre. The oil on paper work Untitled (For Sigi from Sam) (SF62-128), 1962 is a stellar example from this series. Haloed biomorphic objects hover in a white space inhabited by rhythmic splashes of paint.

During the twilight of his life, Francis displayed a magnificent burst of creativity, heroically painting 150+ small paintings with his left hand since his right hand was disabled during a fall. A survey and celebration of these final works, The Last Paintings of Sam Francis, opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1995, a year after Francis’s death.

Francis was married five times and was the father of four children. His first marriage was to a high school girlfriend; he next married Californian painter Muriel Goodwin, followed by Japanese painter Teruko Yokoi, and then Mako Idemitsu. He married his last wife, the painter Margaret Smith, in a Shinto ceremony in Japan in 1985. He died in California in 1994.

Francis has exhibited widely and his work can be found in major international museum collections, including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MOMA, New York; Kunstmuseum, Basel; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Modern Artists at Pearl Lam Galleries

This exhibition is part of a Pearl Lam Galleries initiative to showcase the work of an internationally recognised Modern artist at its Pedder Building gallery space each September, and follows the success of a solo exhibition of work by American Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) held in 2015.