Sam Francis took up lithography in 1960 and it became an important aspect of his artistic practice. In 1970 he established a workshop called the Litho Shop in Santa Monica where he printed and published his own lithographs.

This portfolio of six prints were produced by Francis to accompany a text by the French art critic Michel Waldberg. He drew directly onto six plates and printed them in yellow, red, green, purple, ultramarine, dark blue and black. Francis was extremely active as a printmaker, creating numerous etchings, lithographs and monotypes throughout his life, many of which were executed at the Litho Shop.

“Comme une idée traverse l’esprit
Hors des passages protégés
Parcourt en oblique en courant le carrefour
(laissant une trace précaire sur l’asphalte bleue
la patinoire moirée de la mémoire 
de toutes choses confondues)”

–  An extract of Michel Waldberg’s poem from Poems dans le Ciel.  

Francis brought a worldly and intellectual spirit to his art. Although he eventually settled in California, he traveled widely and lived for extended periods of time in France, Switzerland, Japan, Thailand, and Indonesia. From these locales he absorbed aesthetic and cultural ideas, as evidenced by his diverse artistic inspirations, including Henri Matisse, Dada and Surrealism, Eastern philosophy and religion, and the psychoanalytic theories of Carl Jung.

“Color is born of the interpenetration of light and dark”.

–  Sam Francis

In both his paintings and his prints, Francis remained a steadfast abstractionist. Working in a spontaneous, unpremeditated fashion, he created on a large scale in a vivid palette using a personal vocabulary of biomorphic forms, loose brushstrokes, and an astounding variety of drips and splatters, some controlled and some left to chance.

Benefiting from his ongoing collaboration with various master printers, Francis exploited the possibilities inherent in the colour printmaking process, in which each colour must be printed from a separate stone or plate. He often created compositions by varying the order in which matrices were printed, or recombining different ones to make new images.