Sam Francis

At 71 years old, Sam Francis physical status not available right now. We will update Sam Francis's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Samuel Lewis Francis (June 25, 1923 – November 4, 1994) was an American painter and printmaker.

Early life

Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California, the son of Katherine Lewis Francis Sr. and Samuel Augustus Francis Sr. His mother's death in 1935, who had inspired his passion for music, left him terribly, but his stepmother, Virginia Peterson Francis, had a close relationship with him. In the early 1940s, he attended San Mateo High School.

During World War II, Francis served in the United States Air Force. He was diagnosed with Spinal Tuberculosis while in the Air Corps in 1944. He was in the hospital for many years, and it was during this visit that artist David Park began to paint, that he started to paint. After being out of the hospital, he returned to Berkeley, this time to study art. He received both his BA degree (1949) and MA degree (1950) in Art from the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied botany, medicine, and psychology.

Personal life

Sam Francis was married five times and was the father of four children. He was married from 1947 to 1952, first to Vera Miller, a high school acquaintance, and then to Muriel Goodwin (1955–58) and Teruko Yokoi, with whom he had a daughter, Kayo. Mako Idemitsu, with whom he had two sons, Osamu and Shingo, were married in 1966.

In 1985, he married painter Margaret Smith in a Shinto wedding in Japan. Their son Augustus, who was born in 1986, is also an artist.

Source

Career and artistic development

Francis was initially inspired by abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, and Clyfford Still. Jackson Pollock's loose style was influenced by his art. He later became closely associated with the second generation of abstract expressionists, including Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler, who were keen on the expressive use of color. However, Francis did not fit into any art school well. He charted his own path as one of the first global artists to work around the world.

He lived in Paris in the 1950s and 1958, having his first exhibition at the Galerie Nina Dausset in 1952. He became involved with Tachisme in Paris and was lauded by art critics Michel Tapié and Claude Duthuit (the son-in-law of painter Henri Matisse) who defended his work in Paris.

Between 1950 and 1958, Francis spent time and painted in Paris, the south of France, Tokyo, Mexico City, Bern, and New York. In particular, his artistic growth was influenced by his exposure to French modern painting, Asian history, and Zen Buddhism. His paintings of the 1950s developed through a sequence of stages, beginning with monochromatic abstractions and then larger richly colored murals and "open" paintings that depict large areas of whiteness. Francis began a rapid rise to international prominence in 1953 after his painting "Big Red" was included in the 1956 exhibit "Twelve Artists" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In 1956-8, Francis created massive murals for the Kunsthalle, Basel, and in 1959 for the Chase Manhattan Bank, New York.

He created several works between 1960 and 1963, including the "Blue Balls" series. These works, which were largely blue in nature and drips, were based on the agony of his renal tuberculosis, which he suffered in 1961.

The Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City represented Francis in the early to mid 1960s. He returned to California in the 1960s and kept painting, majority in Los Angeles, but also in Tokyo, where he lived mainly in 1973-4. In 1965, Francis began a series of paintings with large open canvas, minimal color, and a strong line. Dr. James Kirsch's intensive Jungian research grew more in depth in 1971 when he began paying closer attention to his dreams and the unconscious images they shared.

Fresh Air pictures of Francis' early 1970s paintings have been referred to as Fresh Air photographs. These works, which were created by adding pools, drips, and splatters of color to wet bands of paint applied with a roller, reaffirmed the artist's obsession with color. Many of Francis' paintings by 1973–4 featured a grid or matrix made up of crossing tracks of color. Many of these matrix works were large in scale, with some of them reaching up to twenty feet long.

After 1980, the formal system of the grid gradually faded from Francis' work. He was a prolific printmaker, etchings, lithographs, and monotypes, many of which were executed in Santa Monica at the Litho Shop, which Francis owned.

Francis founded The Lapis Press in 1984 with the intention of creating rare and timely texts in visually appealing formats.

In a last burst of hope after a fall, he finished a stunning series of about 150 small paintings before he died. He died in Santa Monica and was buried in Olema, California, in Marin County.

Source