Francis, Sam (1923-1994)

US painter and printmaker. A leading second-generation abstract expressionist, his buoyant paintings fuse American and European abstract styles. He is known for his large, splashed and splattered, floating forms, executed in a high-keyed palette against a white ground, for example Middle Blue No.5 1960.

Initially influenced by the gestural approaches of Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, he developed his own more structured manner in Paris 1950-57 where, under the influence of French Tachisme, he produced largely monochromatic canvases covered with patches of translucent colour and runnels of pigment, as in Blue-Black 1952. His Blue-and-White and Edge series - all-white canvases with coloured edges - followed in the 1960s.

Born in San Mateo, near San Francisco, Francis originally studied medicine and psychology at Berkeley. From 1941-46 he served in the US Air Force, and began painting 1944 when confined to hospital after a plane crash. He returned to Berkeley to study art, and then to Paris to further his development. It was in Paris that he held his first exhibitions. He later spent time travelling in Mexico and India, and then worked in Japan, where the meditative techniques of Zen Buddhism provided him with an insight into the technique, central to his work, of ‘controlled spontaneity’.