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:
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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