Composition 1988

Sam Francis made this, probably in his studio, with paint, maybe acrylic, maybe something else. It’s hard to say! Look at these dominant red shapes and how they burst open to meet the blue lines looping around them, enclosing and colliding. Imagine him standing over the canvas, splattering and staining, letting the colors drip and bleed into each other. I think the material aspects are really important here, so maybe he thinned the paint, maybe he used some kind of medium to make it flow more freely. You can feel the gestures, they are free but also kind of controlled. It makes me think about other artists like Joan Mitchell or Helen Frankenthaler, these painters who were all working at the same time and pushing the boundaries of what painting could be. They were asking big questions about color, form, and the very act of creation. They were all in conversation and so are we, when we look at their work.