FRANCIS, SAM

born June 25, 1923, San Mateo, Calif., U.S. died Nov. 4, 1994, Santa Monica, Calif. in full Samuel Lewis Francis American painter who was prominent in the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. Francis studied medicine at the University of California at Berkeley in 194143 and began painting while in a hospital after being wounded in World War II. He painted his first abstract compositions in 1947. From 1950 to 1957 he lived and worked in Paris, where he came under the influence of the Tachist painters as well as that of Jackson Pollock. He had his first solo exhibition in Paris in 1952. Francis' Blue on a Point (1958) exemplifies his lyrical and elegant approach to Abstract Expressionism. His brilliant colours flow in amorphous, kidney-shaped forms over unpainted canvas, creating a loose, uncrowded effect. Thinly textured paint is applied to the canvas in drips and splashes, creating areas of bright colour that are balanced against each other in powerful asymmetries. His later works, in which narrow streams of colour at the edges of the picture frame a central white space of unpainted gesso, had affinities to the Minimalist painters of the 1960s.