Sam Francis is a painter whose public profile doesn't quite match his professional reputation. To a large extent that's because he side-steps all the potential critical and art-historical categories that might define him. But when people come face to face with his work, particularly something such as the Tate Gallery's enormous Around the Blues, or one of the pieces in the Pompidou Centre, their usual reaction is "Wow!"
His painting has the effect of shortcircuiting a detached, analytical reaction and impressing itself directly on the eyes. Ocular sensation is what he's all about.
In his larger pictures, thin translucent pools of intense colour are laid down on a brilliant white ground. Often sizeable expanses of the ground are left untouched, and he talked of the "ringing silence" of this white space. The surfaces are untidy, with numerous drips and splashes, and wet colours bleeding into each other, yet, out of all this hustle and bustle, a poise and serenity somehow emerge. The net result is an incredible, floating lightness. In fact, he once made a "sky painting" that involved choreographing five helicopters, releasing coloured vapour trails to make a predetermined composition that slowly dissolved in the air.
A sense of space is evident even when he works on a much smaller scale, as in the lithographs and paintings on paper that make up his Galway Arts Festival exhibition. Curated by Jack Rutberg at the NUI Galway Gallery, this is the first one-person show of Francis's work to be seen in Ireland.
By the time of his death in 1994, some of the categories that he hadn't quite fitted into were Abstract Expressionist, Tachiste and Post-Painterly Abstractionist, though he intersected with all of them at some point in his rather unusual career. One look at his work is enough to tell you that he had to have come from the West Coast, despite his later links with the New York School: he was indeed born in California, in San Mateo, in 1923.
Before getting around to art he began studying medicine and psychology in the early 1940s, but then served with the American Air Force for the last two years of the war. Injured, he underwent a long recuperation during which he began to paint. He then decided he wanted to study painting, which he did initially in San Francisco, where Clifford Still was one of his teachers, and later at Berkeley. To begin with, the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Jackson Pollock, were a significant influence, and Francis is often, but inadequately, described as a second generation Abstract Expressionist.
By 1950 and his first trip to Europe, the essential elements of his style were in place: amorphous blots of pure colour applied and allowed to drip and mix on the canvas, densely packed against a white ground. But, in a reversal of the usual pattern that saw European artists injecting new life into post-war American art, he found Europe invigorating and inspiring. He was the only expatriate, for example, among the 17 American painters in the big touring show, "The New American Painting", in 1958.
Settled in Paris, he became associated with the circle of artists around the influential Canadian painter, Jean Paul Riopelle. His work didn't become Europeanised, however. In fact, it's impossible to think of a single European painter who could have made paintings as free and uncompromising as those he produced in the early 1950s in Paris. The Europeans tended to smooth off the rough edges of Abstract Expressionism, and give it an air of contrivance in the process. Yet Francis also seemed to have a lighter touch than his home-based American counterparts. Perhaps the bridge was his interest in the East, encouraged by the traditionally strong Japanese presence in Paris.
This crystallised in 1957, when a round-the-world trip was punctuated by lengthy stays in New York, Mexico and, most significantly, Japan. While he was there he painted a mural for the Sofu School of Flower Arrangement and held several exhibitions. It was his attentive absorption of aspects of Japanese aesthetics that led to several decisive developments in his work.
These included opening out his compositions, which he did by clustering areas of colour and allowing in the void, the bare white space, as a positive force. In place of overall patterns, as well, the compositions became asymmetric.
Finally, Japanese ink drawing validated his instinctive liking for using thin, fluid pigment. One writer has also pointed out the influence of the Japanese haboku, or flung ink technique, on his method. In any case, all of these innovations have remained characteristic of his work. The one notable refinement is his use of a geometric framework to define the boundaries between painted and unpainted areas. And at times the central void has pushed the colour back to the very edges of the composition.
So Francis emerges as an artist who consistently avoided fitting into any of the identities offered to him by opportunity and design. His West Coast sensibility was tempered by the influence of the New York School, but he bypassed New York and found a niche for himself in Europe's old artistic capital, Paris. But that too led elsewhere, and he was able to incorporate convincingly the lessons of Japanese art into his own painting without being at all overwhelmed by the East - no mean feat.
From this curious mix of generative influences, his work emerges as very much his own. In spirit, in offering the viewer a space to enter, it harks back to Monet's great water lily paintings. It also anticipates the generation of American painters first described by Clement Greenberg as "Post-Painterly Abstractionists". They include Jules Olitski, Ellsworth Kelly, Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella. But Francis is, without a doubt, one of those individual talents who have navigated their own course through a century dominated by hegemonies of movements and styles.
It is true that his work is not currently fashionable, largely because narrative concerns of one kind or another dominate the art world, and that does leave him out in the cold. But don't be put off by the whims of fashion. Let your eyes decide. After all, as he put it himself: "There are as many images as there are eyes to see them."
The Sam Francis exhibition is at University College Galway Gallery.
