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Life Arts    H4'ed 6/19/12

Keep Your Friends Close: Seven Fairly Old Sam Francis Paintings

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Message Gentry L Rowsey
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I took an art survey course in college in the early 1960's, but none of it got to me, probably because the course spent about thirty minutes on post-19th Century Art. And a good twenty years passed afterwards before I found a book of Magritte paintings upstairs at Cody's in Berkeley which was so satisfying I didn't look at non-Surrealist art for about 25 years. Then around 2003, I started looking at Christies and Sotheby's auctions online, making slide-shows and backgrounds out of the art I liked, and after a brief affair with Fauvism, I got wiped out by Abstract Expressionism. It was then that I made friends with Sam Francis' art.

I'd been living in and around the San Francisco Bay area since 1963, and I remember thinking "Sam probably named himself after the place where he made most of his art." I still don't know if that's true, but of course, whether it's true only matters like whether art is true matters.  

There's an old Italian Mob saying: Keep Your Friends Close, and Keep Your Enemies Closer. I've always thought of Sam Francis as a close friend:

Sam Francis in 1983,
Sam Francis in 1983,
(Image by Artnet Magazine and Courtesy of Timothy Yarger)
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There follow seven abstract expressionist paintings by the immortal Sam Francis, non-geometrical in the style which originally appealed to me and which to this day I think of as the "Sam Francis style."

Enjoy:








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I have a law degree (Stanford, 66') but have never practiced. Instead, from 1967 through 1977, I tried to contribute to the revolution in America. As unsuccessful as everyone else over that decade, in 1978 I went to work for the U.S. Forest (more...)
 
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