.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
This work is identified with the archival identification number of SFF. 356 in consideration for the forthcoming addendum to the Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, to be published by the Sam Francis Foundation. This information is subject to change as scholarship continues by the Sam Francis Foundation.
Sam Francis had a prolific career that spanned decades and continents, and was possessed of a unique visual style that drew from both his Abstract Expressionist predecessors and the Impressionists. Throughout his oeuvre, Francis had a consistent passion for pushing abstract painting to new levels while defining a singular style that arose from within. Notions of light, water, and air are prevalent in Francis’s work, and his influences grew from both internal and external sources. Of his work, he wrote “I am fascinated by gravity, I like to fly to soar, to float like a cloud, but I am tied down to place. No matter where I am… it’s always the same. Painting is a way in and a way out.” (S. Francis, as quoted by P. Selz, Sam Francis, 1982, New York, p. 14.) In the Blue Balls series, from which the dazzling Blue Balls VI was painted in 1962, we find a deeply personal evolution in the artist’s career. Open and free-flowing, with graceful touches of blue artfully placed on a white canvas, Blue Balls VI is the work of a virtuoso painter.
Depicting a series of ephemeral and beautiful swirling blue shapes that dance around the canvas, accented by touches of warmer colors, Blue Balls VI, is a superb example of the artist’s early 1960s series. The blue orbs appear to float and flow around the edge of the canvas, their fluid movements echoing their organic circular shapes. Like clouds or constellations, these blue forms defy a fixed state, and appear to be captured in a frozen instant. These aqueous forms, at once bold and translucent, occupy the upper and side portions of the canvas, and are rendered all the more stunning by their placement on a white background with hints of drips and splatters. While the dominant color is blue, Francis has added elements of yellow, green, and red that enhance the richness and dynamism of the painting. The gestural movement of shapes, which appear to almost be floating around the perimeter of the canvas, seem to converge on the lower left corner, where the strongest splash of red appears, signaling the end of this implied pictorial rotation. The painting’s scale echoes human proportions, and its use of emotive color provoke a sense of liberation and serenity in its viewer.
The Blue Balls paintings arose out of an exceptional time in Francis’s life and career. Afflicted with tuberculosis in his youth, he was bedridden for three years in the 1940s and in the early 1960s, the same illness returned, and for much of 1961 he was convalescing in Bern, Switzerland. In 1962, he returned to California where he continued painting as part of his therapy. Of this time, he wrote: “I live in a paradise of hellish blue balls—merely floating, everything floats, everything floats—where I carry this unique mathematics of my imagination through the succession of days towards a nameless tomorrow. What a delight as if I were lighting the way with my own eyes against my will and knowing that I’d rather have paneless windows for eyes. So I continue to make my machines of strokes, dabs and splashes and indulge in my dialectic of eros—objectively for myself and subjectively in the eyes of the audience” (S. Francis, as quoted by P. Selz, Sam Francis, 1982, New York, p. 80). For Francis, the Blue Balls paintings visualized these thoughts and also expressed the joyousness of his eventual return to health. A bold departure from the brightly colored works of the 1950s, these paintings ushered in an increase in minimalist tendencies that would influence his painting in subsequent years.
Defying consistent classification, Francis’s work truly springs from a place of personal soulful expression and unrelenting painterly urgency. A deeply thoughtful artist, his desire to travel and seek new experiences brought him across the globe. With time spent living and working in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Bern, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, there was a restless energy to his need to experience the world and put those sensations into his art. His international approach to his art-making and life is something that sets him apart from his contemporaries. When he finished his studies in California, he chose not to migrate to New York, and instead moved to Paris in 1950 for several years. Drawn to the city for its energy and its painterly traditions, Francis admired the work of Matisse, Monet, and Bonnard. This affinity with the French painterly modes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is one that is evident in his work throughout. For instance, Monet’s Nymphéas proved to be a strong influence, and we can see how the French master’s paintings of water lilies foreshadows the subtle elegance of Blue Balls VI. Ultimately, for Francis, painting was a means to express his fascinations with his medium, and a unique forum for expressing conscious and unconscious abstraction.
Sam Francis had a prolific career that spanned decades and continents, and was possessed of a unique visual style that drew from both his Abstract Expressionist predecessors and the Impressionists. Throughout his oeuvre, Francis had a consistent passion for pushing abstract painting to new levels while defining a singular style that arose from within. Notions of light, water, and air are prevalent in Francis’s work, and his influences grew from both internal and external sources. Of his work, he wrote “I am fascinated by gravity, I like to fly to soar, to float like a cloud, but I am tied down to place. No matter where I am… it’s always the same. Painting is a way in and a way out.” (S. Francis, as quoted by P. Selz, Sam Francis, 1982, New York, p. 14.) In the Blue Balls series, from which the dazzling Blue Balls VI was painted in 1962, we find a deeply personal evolution in the artist’s career. Open and free-flowing, with graceful touches of blue artfully placed on a white canvas, Blue Balls VI is the work of a virtuoso painter.
Depicting a series of ephemeral and beautiful swirling blue shapes that dance around the canvas, accented by touches of warmer colors, Blue Balls VI, is a superb example of the artist’s early 1960s series. The blue orbs appear to float and flow around the edge of the canvas, their fluid movements echoing their organic circular shapes. Like clouds or constellations, these blue forms defy a fixed state, and appear to be captured in a frozen instant. These aqueous forms, at once bold and translucent, occupy the upper and side portions of the canvas, and are rendered all the more stunning by their placement on a white background with hints of drips and splatters. While the dominant color is blue, Francis has added elements of yellow, green, and red that enhance the richness and dynamism of the painting. The gestural movement of shapes, which appear to almost be floating around the perimeter of the canvas, seem to converge on the lower left corner, where the strongest splash of red appears, signaling the end of this implied pictorial rotation. The painting’s scale echoes human proportions, and its use of emotive color provoke a sense of liberation and serenity in its viewer.
The Blue Balls paintings arose out of an exceptional time in Francis’s life and career. Afflicted with tuberculosis in his youth, he was bedridden for three years in the 1940s and in the early 1960s, the same illness returned, and for much of 1961 he was convalescing in Bern, Switzerland. In 1962, he returned to California where he continued painting as part of his therapy. Of this time, he wrote: “I live in a paradise of hellish blue balls—merely floating, everything floats, everything floats—where I carry this unique mathematics of my imagination through the succession of days towards a nameless tomorrow. What a delight as if I were lighting the way with my own eyes against my will and knowing that I’d rather have paneless windows for eyes. So I continue to make my machines of strokes, dabs and splashes and indulge in my dialectic of eros—objectively for myself and subjectively in the eyes of the audience” (S. Francis, as quoted by P. Selz, Sam Francis, 1982, New York, p. 80). For Francis, the Blue Balls paintings visualized these thoughts and also expressed the joyousness of his eventual return to health. A bold departure from the brightly colored works of the 1950s, these paintings ushered in an increase in minimalist tendencies that would influence his painting in subsequent years.
Defying consistent classification, Francis’s work truly springs from a place of personal soulful expression and unrelenting painterly urgency. A deeply thoughtful artist, his desire to travel and seek new experiences brought him across the globe. With time spent living and working in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Bern, Mexico City, and Los Angeles, there was a restless energy to his need to experience the world and put those sensations into his art. His international approach to his art-making and life is something that sets him apart from his contemporaries. When he finished his studies in California, he chose not to migrate to New York, and instead moved to Paris in 1950 for several years. Drawn to the city for its energy and its painterly traditions, Francis admired the work of Matisse, Monet, and Bonnard. This affinity with the French painterly modes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is one that is evident in his work throughout. For instance, Monet’s Nymphéas proved to be a strong influence, and we can see how the French master’s paintings of water lilies foreshadows the subtle elegance of Blue Balls VI. Ultimately, for Francis, painting was a means to express his fascinations with his medium, and a unique forum for expressing conscious and unconscious abstraction.