Untitled 044 1987

This is a Sam Francis painting, or rather, a print of a painting—look at the freshness of the colors and the splatters, the sense of an event, of something barely held together. I bet it was made with lithography. You can sense the artist working in layers, starting with thin washes and building up to these juicy drips. Imagine him leaning over a flat surface, maybe a table, coaxing the paint around. There’s something so casual about how the colors pool and bleed into one another, like watercolor, but also something really determined about the overall composition. Look at the confident gestures and chromatic intensity. Francis’s work is like an exchange of ideas, with other colorists like Matisse, and of course Helen Frankenthaler. But here, unlike his peers, he's also letting some blank space hold its own, which, for me, opens the work to so many other possibilities. In the end, it shows how painting can embrace chance and still be so alive.