Francis, Sam

Sam Francis was an American painter who played one of the leading roles in the Abstract Expressionist movement in America. During the Second World War he was a pilot and in 1944 he was hospitalized due to a plane crash. It was precisely during these two years of recovery that his interest in painting, and especially its therapeutic benefits, emerged. He quickly began to study art at Berkeley. After discovering artists of abstract art in San Francisco, Francis moved to Paris in 1948, where he soon met other American colleagues of action painting.

 

While Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline represented this movement in the United States, Sam Francis developed his European version of Tachism and lyrical abstraction. Thus, he began using the technique of dripping and pouring paint. He covered the white canvas with colors in a more or less random way. In his pictorial works, the canvas is a neutral background for the colorful and patterned structure of bright coloring. His use of pure colors, the gestural technique and some selected geometric shapes make his paintings unique.

 

Sam Francis loved to use the techniques of lithography and silkscreen for his prints. They gave him the freedom to mass produce his aesthetic visions. In fact, these printing techniques offered the artist the same tools and did not limit his unbridled painterly creativity. Today, his works are exhibited in the world's greatest museums. One of his paintings put the Obama family on one of the walls in the White House.