Untitled (SFE – 044)

Description

Untitled (SFE – 044) is an original Sam Francis Etching with Aquatint on Rives BFK paper. One of 13 unique color trial proofs before the regular edition of 27. Annotated ‘CTP’ lower left and pencil signed. Published by The Litho Shop with full paper margins.
Lembark I I.78

The trial proofs are the most valuable proofs and do not form part of the edition. These proofs were used by Sam Francis while he was conceptualizing the final print. Sam Francis created thirteen of these unique trial proofs to see how the print would look with different color combinations. These prints are the most highly valued and sought-after by collectors as they are true uniques.

Artist Sam Francis was late to start his successful and brilliant career as a painter and printmaker. Sam Francis was born in San Mateo California in 1923. Sam Francis attended the University of California, Berkeley, where Francis studied botany, medicine and psychology. Shortly thereafter, Sam Francis served in the United States Air Force during WWII where he suffered injury in a plane crash. Francis was in the hospital for several years, and it was there that Sam Francis began to paint, and develop his love for art. Finding an artistic voice was therapeutic for Francis, and the art created in this time had a great influence on his emotional recovery. After his released from the hospital, Sam Francis returned to U.C. Berkeley to study art, and eventually earned both a B.A. and an M.A.

Sam Francis was an American artist known for his exuberantly colorful, large-scale abstract paintings. His practice incorporated elements from Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Impressionism, and Eastern philosophy to create a unique style of painterly abstraction. Influenced by Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, he is more closely associated to the work of Helen Frankenthaler, as he was more interested in the formal arrangement of the picture plane than the expressivity of the individual artist. “Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment,” he once reflected. Born on June 25, 1923 in San Mateo, CA, he briefly served in the US Air Force during World War II but was injured during a test flight. Returning to California, he received his BA and MA from UC Berkeley in botany and psychology before beginning to pursue a career in art. The artist traveled widely during his career, and he was closely aligned with the Art Informel movement while living abroad in Paris during the 1950s. Francis died on November 4, 1994 in Santa Monica, CA at the age of 71. He was a founding trustee of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and his paintings can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others.