A FLoating World

In his studio, as in his life, 'everything floats'. Sam Francis' world seemed to be always on the move. Barely had he set up home, studio, family in one country than he was off again, setting a new course - for California, France, Switzerland or Japan, with a restless energy that was of the air rather than the earth. His mind, too, ranged freely and widely, floating over the ordered terrain of European abstraction, the vibrant expanse and saturated light of the American West, and the empty space of Zen Buddhism, without ever seeming to come to ground anywhere for long enough to be trapped by deeper, and so inevitably slower (and perhaps darker) exploration.

This was the pilot grounded in wartime crash who, while lying on his back for over a year, staring skywards, determined to reach altitude once more in his imagination. For a time, his luminous colours, especially his blues, hovered on the point of dissolution in white space. Yet it wasn't always an easy journey. At moments in his life, if not literally, he would crash again. Brought down by a debilitating illness in Tokyo in 1961, he nevertheless used his physical immobility to launch his thinking on a new trajectory, reworking his ethereal blues into biomorphic symbols; blue balls that began as a way of identifying physical pain but which soon floated free of their origins, released into a space that seems to be both stellar and microscopic.

It happened again during his final illness in the 1990s, when frustrated by the inability to use his right arm, he rose up in one final burst of manic energy to produce 152 small paintings with his left. While these last may lack the clarity of his earlier work, they nevertheless reinforce an aspect of what continues to make him important: as an example to artists no longer working in the optimistic sunlight of the 1960s, but in the shadows of a more conceptual and ironic climate, of an indomitable spirit. His unrestrained joy in the act of painting and mark-making is a necessary reminder of the need, and of a painter's corresponding capacity, to celebrate life.

Even as he came increasingly to command and communicate empty space - pushing his paint right to the edge, as he did in the late 1960s (and of which there is a good example here, a gouache from circa 1966) - he never lost hold of that sense of excitement and possibility. This was nor space as nothing, the 'emptying out' that it became for Newman and Rothko. For at any moment its white expanse might be traversed, leaving a chromatic jet-stream in its wake, or else gently punctuated with the lightest dot or squiggle, as when motes in the eye dance across a clear sky.

This was a quality that many artists came to recognize and appreciate, starting in this country with Patrick Heron who, like David Sylvester, saw and wrote about his work for the first time in 1957. If, as some writers have suggested, the paintings lack gravitas, it is in no sense at least because they defy gravity; devoid of existential angst, they float free, present in the moment and as fragile as a daydream.