Sam Francis: "Spring Solution"

Sam Francis engaged deeply with printmaking throughout his career, eventually establishing his own print studio where he could approach the medium with much of the freedom and spontaneity that characterized his paintings. Having acquired a lithography press from June Wayne in 1967, as the Tamarind Lithography Workshop was preparing to move from Los Angeles to Albuquerque, Francis established The Litho Shop in Santa Monica in 1970, just a few blocks from his painting studio. Equipped for lithography and eventually etching, the studio allowed Francis to work closely with a small group of master printers while developing increasingly sophisticated approaches to color printing.

Produced there in 1972, "Spring Solution" belongs to the relatively early years of The Litho Shop and exemplifies the technical and chromatic experimentation that came to define Francis’s printmaking. Across the sheet, overlapping passages of blue, yellow, pink, red, violet, and multiple shades of green coalesce into a densely layered field of color. Forms alternately emerge from and dissolve into one another, while areas of exposed paper create moments of openness within the composition. Despite the highly technical and sequential process required to produce it, the finished lithograph retains the immediacy associated with Francis’s painting.

Francis’s working method depended upon a balance between spontaneity and technical control. Nancy Mozur, who served as The Litho Shop’s administrator, curator, and documenter from 1971 until 1988, remembered that when Francis entered the studio, "the atmosphere always changed." She described his "deep, silent respect for the elements interacting within each process" and his ability to "play with chance, riding the tension between control and chaos." Ruth E. Fine similarly observed in "Patterns Across the Membrane of the Mind" that Francis "almost never makes advance plans." Rather than arriving with a composition already resolved, Francis allowed an image to develop through the process of making it. Proofing consequently became an integral creative stage during which decisions about color, form, and placement could substantially alter the final work.

Francis structured The Litho Shop around this working method. By maintaining a full-time staff of printers, he could return to an image, revise it, proof another color, or pursue an unexpected direction without conforming to the schedule of an outside print workshop. Printer George Page characterized Francis’s approach to collaboration as "generous and free of constraints." Francis might complete his drawings rapidly and designate plates for individual colors, after which artist and printer entered what Page described as an "exciting, high-energy process" of intensive color proofing and experimentation.

The complexity of this process is particularly apparent in "Spring Solution." The lithograph was constructed from seven stones and printed in seven successive runs: light green, dark green, magenta, yellow, dark blue, turquoise green, and red. Each color therefore represents a separate stage in the construction of the image, with every successive printing interacting with the colors already present on the sheet. What initially appears to be a spontaneous accumulation of pigment is consequently the result of a carefully orchestrated sequence of overlapping impressions.

Color sequencing presented a particular technical challenge. Jacob Samuel, one of The Litho Shop’s printers, developed procedures for determining the order in which Francis’s colors should be printed. Because transparent and overlapping inks could alter those beneath them, a change in sequence could discolor, overwhelm, or mute particular passages. The objective was to build increasingly complex fields of overlapping color while preserving the clarity and intensity of individual pigments.

The inks themselves were equally important. Francis used custom inks milled by Dan Cytron, a former Gemini G.E.L. printer who began developing colors for the artist after recognizing that pigments used in Francis’s paintings could also be incorporated into printing inks. Commercial printmaking inks offered a substantially narrower range of pigments than artists’ oil paints, limiting Francis’s ability to achieve the chromatic range central to his work. Cytron selected pigments for their lightfastness and suitability for printing and ultimately developed custom inks across the color spectrum. Page later described the resulting palette as "the most complete and brilliant set of color inks ever formulated."

In "Spring Solution," these technical innovations are inseparable from the visual experience of the work. Saturated passages retain their intensity even as colors accumulate across the sheet. Deep blues and greens anchor the composition, while yellow, magenta, and red emerge against them. The white paper remains an active element rather than merely a ground, creating areas of light and space between denser concentrations of pigment. Color functions simultaneously as the subject of the work and the means through which its movement and spatial relationships are established.

The importance of color sequencing is further demonstrated by the existence of an alternate version of "Spring Solution." Page recalled that The Litho Shop occasionally editioned two versions of an image, and "Spring Solution" was also produced using several of the same stones but with a different eight-color sequence. The alternate printing demonstrates the extent to which changes in the order and interaction of colors could transform a composition derived from the same underlying matrices.

Printed by Hitoshi Takatsuki with the assistance of Keith Kirts at The Litho Shop in 1972, "Spring Solution" emerged during a particularly fertile period in Francis’s engagement with lithography. The impression is signed by Francis at lower right and numbered at lower left, with The Litho Shop’s publisher chop and Takatsuki’s printer’s chop also appearing at the lower right of the sheet. According to the "Sam Francis Prints Catalogue Raisonné," impressions of the work were subsequently included in exhibitions in St. Louis in 1972, Los Angeles in 1974, Paris in 1975, and exhibitions in Europe and Honolulu later in the decade and during the 1980s.

"Spring Solution" demonstrates how Francis translated the apparent spontaneity and chromatic intensity of his paintings into a medium fundamentally dependent upon process and sequence. Its energetic field of color was developed through seven stones, seven successive printings, custom-formulated inks, extensive proofing, and sustained collaboration between artist and printers. The Litho Shop provided Francis with an environment in which experimentation could generate increasingly sophisticated technical solutions, allowing control and chance to operate simultaneously within the printed image.