Elegance and Mischief
The Paintings of Sam Francis

The spirit of a Zen parable seems to animate the life and work of Sam Francis. In autumn, after a monk had carefully raked the fallen leaves from the monastery grounds and formed them into a neat pile, he grabbed a handful of crimson leaves and scattered a few splashes of colour across the spotless surface. Perhaps the story suggests that it is better to honour nature’s cycles than to impose an artificial order on the world, a lesson about the futility of seeking perfection. But, beyond any moral, mischief lurks. Tossing leaves across a freshly raked garden is an urge to mess with an overly rational, overly organised world. Sam Francis made a life’s work of scattering leaves of colour, creating an elegant balance by messing things up, and it is his preference for incompleteness over purity that gives his paintings distinctive beauty and power. A restless curiosity and an appetite for visual pleasure fuelled his vision, and it was one that avoided the solemnity and absoluteness that characterised much twentieth century abstraction.

Sam Francis was born in California, a land synonymous with new freedoms and opportunities, golden sunsets and the best of the American dream, but it is also a place that sits, geographically and spiritually, about halfway between Europe and Asia. Thus Francis could participate in the Abstract Expressionism of Hans Hoffman, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko (each artist spent time teaching in San Francisco) and, through his travels in Japan and lifelong interest in Zen, the ink wash and splatter techniques of sixteenth century Japanese masters Sesshu or Tohaku. In 1950, Francis moved to Paris to absorb the French tradition, enrolled at Leger’s school, befriended Giacometti, Joan Mitchell and Jean-Paul Riopelle, then returned to the open spaces of California, travelled to Japan, to India and Switzerland, always exploring, along the way, the possibilities of visual experience and abstraction. Everything seemed available to him, and he gathered friends, influences, exhibitions and accolades with equal zest.

Francis’s early paintings, such as Untitled (1954), were characterised by earthy hues and naturalistic forms. The pattern of repeated ovular forms in this painting might bring to mind seashells strewn on a beach or the worn-out cobblestones of Paris under a blanket of fog, but the image also resembles the quilted cloud formations in one of Stieglitz’s ‘Equivalents’, circa 1926. The cloud shapes may have been simmering in his memory during the long period of hospitalisation caused by the plane crash that damaged his spine, and these memories would carry a strong emotional resonance, even a sniff of freedom. But while the visual similarities are remarkable, the differences of intention are even more revealing. Stieglitz sought to illustrate a universal emotion, get at something invisible through a kind of diagram, whereas Francis was looking for a meditative experience based squarely in the eyes.

Within a few years he loosened his palette and his sense of space. In Scattered Violets (1957), little rivulets drip from delicate pools of primary colours and blend across the textured paper in a graceful suspension of time and gravity. The painting conveys none of Pollock’s declamatory bravado, but instead possesses an airiness that hints at the artist’s gentleness and moderation. In Untitled (1957), the trickles and splatters form into an image of a long-legged insect balancing on a twig; slender legs of dripping pigment fall dynamically to the bottom of the painting, and the image hums with energy and grace.

In the early 60s, prompted by a lengthy convalescence from a second bout of tuberculosis, his painting changed dramatically. In his «Blue Ball» series, he painted biomorphic forms, floating blobs in blues and purples, like pools of microscopic sea creatures. Later in the same decade, in his so-called «Edge» paintings, he cleared the canvas, left it white, and only bars of colour along the edges remained to lend form to the painting. It was as if he had to rake the canvas clean to see it anew. This is an underrated group of paintings, and represents an essential step in his development, but at the same time a fastidiously raked garden tends to look forced and wilful. The extreme measures precipitated an outburst of energy that fuelled the creation of some of his most distinctive paintings during the early and mid 70s. Many of the paintings use the modernist grid as a kind of scaffold to create a splattered and rhythmic surface, full of pools and streaks of colour that look forever as if they are about to dissolve into formlessness. The paintings achieve a stunning balance of elegance and mischief. Late in life, that urge to scatter and stain took hold of him in a flurry of exuberant paint flinging. An image of Francis in his studio in the late 80s shows a monk-like figure hunched over a field of white spaces, ready with his hand and a pail of paint. The courtyard has been cleared of all the leaves; all that is left is the beginning, made up of blank paper and empty canvas and Francis is poised, ready to scatter the colour, palpable and brilliant, against the blankness of an overly ordered world.