Untitled

‘Each colour is the result of burning, for each substance burns with a particular colour. The processes talked about in alchemy are parallel to the processes in painting. For that reason I am fascinated with alchemy. But my work is not just my painting -- it is something else. Painting holds me in check, so to speak, or keeps me from flying off in other directions. It is a way of being anchored in the world’

(S. Francis, quoted in J. Butterfield, ‘The Other Side of Wonder’, in Sam Francis: Works on Paper, Boston, 1979).

Painted in 1957, Sam Francis’ Untitled is a stunning example from a series of works that explored the visual power of white. Produced between 1957 and 1959, these works were based on a chapter in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, in which Ishmael relates his fear of the whiteness of the great whale: ‘It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me’, Ishmael relates, ‘so mystical and well-nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form’ (S. Francis, quoted in P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York, 1982, p. 62). In the present work, Francis captures this very sensation through the medium of paint. His seemingly extreme drive for empty and open spaces is stunningly counterbalanced by an urge to scatter and stain the blankness of an overly ordered world. The trickles and splatters of paint recall a flash of lightening, as a transient as thunder, as streams of dripping pigment fall dynamically to the bottom of the painting, and the electrical image hums with energy and grace. The limitless expanse of white mass punctures and separates the active colour whorl and its suspended lower satellite threatening to consume it, yet the force burst of colour, like footsteps in a white snowfield or a flight of birds against the sky, resists and even violates the white with its invincible presence.

A second-generation Abstract Expressionist, Francis reinvented the physical act of painting, exploiting drips, splatters, and controlled surface accidents. He did not follow a systematic system of experimentation but rather simply allowed oil and acrylic to coexist on the surface, sometimes side by side, sometimes overlapping. As a colourist, Francis’ roots are deeply embedded in the Modernist tradition; yet in his work colour is not simply released from line, nor is it colour for its own sake, but colour for its meaning and power. Francis liked to use highly pigmented, saturated colours, where the ratio of dry material to liquid dispersion yielded a super-rich tint. The luminous intensity of his colours is, in Francis's words, ‘like a firing of the eye. Colour is light on fire, each colour is the result of burning, for each substance burns with a particular colour. The processes talked about in alchemy are parallel to the processes in painting. For that reason I am fascinated with alchemy. But my work is not just my painting -- it is something else. Painting holds me in check, so to speak, or keeps me from flying off in other directions. It is a way of being anchored in the world’ (S. Francis, quoted in J. Butterfield, ‘The Other Side of Wonder’, Sam Francis: Works on Paper, Boston, 1979).