Sam Francis

"Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment." – Sam Francis

Sam Francis seemed to perceive his art and his own existence as part of a continuously flowing process; we are all at the very center of time and space. Creation is part of an ongoing growth process, a fusion of past experiences that continuously merge with new ones and are transformed, where colors and forms grow in and out of each other in an unbroken sequence, like a single, even wave. For Sam Francis, color was more than just a medium—it had its own expressive life. It carried emotion, almost sacred in its presence.

Claudia Friedrich writes: "Red, blue, yellow, green, violet—radiantly colored pigments are spontaneously and dynamically applied to paper and canvas. Thin rivulets flow across the ground, forming organic-looking constellations of form, encountering floating areas of color that emerge like luminous islands in a lake of white ground. Seemingly random and intuitive, patterns are woven, synapses established. Sam Francis’ works convey much more to us than they seem to at first glance: the finite delineation of the material through cropping and the dissolution of the separation between inside and outside provide insight into the artistic creative process."