Sam Francis engaged deeply with printmaking throughout his career, eventually establishing his own print studio where he could approach the medium with the same 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 studio. Equipped for lithography and eventually etching, the studio allowed Francis to explore printmaking on his own terms while working closely with a small, dedicated group of master printers.
Spring Solution, produced there in 1972, is a relatively early example of a lithograph created at The Litho Shop that demonstrates the increasingly sophisticated approach to color that Francis and his printers developed there. 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 seem alternately to emerge from and dissolve into one another, while areas of exposed paper provide moments of openness within the composition. The result retains the immediacy of Francis's painting despite having been constructed through the highly technical and sequential process of lithographic printing.
Francis’s approach to painting was both spontaneous and technical. Nancy Mozur, who worked at The Litho Shop as its administrator, curator, and documenter from 1971 until 1988, remembered that when Francis entered the studio, "the atmosphere always changed." She described him as an artist with a "deep, silent respect for the elements interacting within each process,” noting his ability to "play with chance, riding the tension between control and chaos." Although the apparent spontaneity of Francis's forms could suggest the process was almost effortless, Mozur argued that the opposite was true: his mastery as an artist was a result of his ability to respond intuitively to the image as it developed.
SAM FRANCIS | (Detail) Spring Solution, 1972. Lithograph, 23 x 18 in (58 x 46 cm)
That responsiveness was particularly important to Francis's printmaking. Rather than arriving at the studio with a composition already resolved and ready to be translated into a printed medium, his prints evolved as he was making them. Ruth E. Fine explains in "Patterns Across the Membrane of the Mind" that Francis "almost never makes advance plans." Each stage of a print developed in response to the decisions that preceded it. Proofing was therefore not intended to reproduce a predetermined image; rather, it was an essential part of the creative process during which major decisions about color, shape, and placement were made.
Francis structured The Litho Shop to accommodate his unique way of working. He kept the studio staffed full time, initially with one master printer and eventually with two, reducing the waiting periods that were otherwise an unavoidable part of working at a professional print studio. The arrangement gave Francis the ability to return to an image, revise it, proof another color, or pursue an unexpected direction without having to conform his working process to an outside studio's schedule.
SAM FRANCIS | (Detail) Spring Solution, 1972. Lithograph, 23 x 18 in (58 x 46 cm)
The environment that developed around the shop was consequently both highly technical and unusually experimental. Printer George Page remembered Francis's approach to collaboration as "generous and free of constraints." Francis could complete his drawings quickly and then designate the plates for individual colors, after which printer and artist entered an intensive period of color proofing. Page described these sessions as an "exciting, high-energy process" in which experimentation ultimately determined the appearance of the finished edition.
That process is particularly evident 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 finally red. Each color therefore represents a separate stage in the development of the image. What appears at first glance to be an explosive and spontaneous accumulation of pigment is actually the product of a carefully orchestrated sequence in which every additional layer altered the colors and forms already on the sheet.
SAM FRANCIS | (Detail) Spring Solution, 1972. Lithograph, 23 x 18 in (58 x 46 cm)
Producing such complex color lithographs required considerable experimentation within The Litho Shop. Jacob Samuel, one of the studio's printers, developed procedures for determining the sequence in which Francis's colors should be printed. Because transparent and overlapping inks could alter the appearance of colors beneath them, the order mattered: certain pigments could discolor, overwhelm, or mute others if they were printed at the wrong stage. The challenge was to build increasingly complex layers of color while allowing individual passages to retain their clarity and intensity.
The inks themselves were equally important. Francis's prints at The Litho Shop used custom inks milled by Dan Cytron, a former Gemini G.E.L. printer who began developing colors for Francis after realizing that pigments used in the artist's paintings could also be incorporated into printing inks. Commercial printmaking inks offered a considerably narrower range of pigments than artists' oil paints, limiting Francis's ability to reproduce the extraordinary chromatic range that had become fundamental to his work. Cytron therefore selected pigments for their lightfastness and suitability for printing and 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."
SAM FRANCIS | (Detail) Spring Solution, 1972. Lithograph, 23 x 18 in (58 x 46 cm)
In Spring Solution, those technical innovations become inseparable from the visual experience of the work. Saturated passages of color retain their individual intensity even as they accumulate across the sheet. Deep blues and greens anchor the composition, while flashes of yellow, magenta, and red push forward against them. The white of the paper remains active within the image rather than simply serving as a background, creating pockets of light and space between the denser concentrations of pigment. Color becomes both the subject of the work and the means through which its sense of movement is created.
Francis's interest in color developed through an unusually international career. He lived and worked at various points in California, Paris, New York, Japan, and Switzerland, absorbing influences that ranged from Abstract Expressionism and European modernism to Eastern philosophy and religion. Although associated with the second generation of Abstract Expressionism, Francis developed an aesthetic that was distinctly his own.
The proofing process could consequently lead Francis toward substantially different interpretations of the same composition. Page recalled that The Litho Shop sometimes editioned two versions of an image; Spring Solution itself exists in an alternate version, produced from several of the same stones but using a different eight-color sequence. Rather than functioning simply as a reproduction of the primary image, the alternate printing demonstrates how profoundly a change in sequence of overlaid colors could transform the same composition.
SAM FRANCIS | (Detail) Spring Solution, 1972. Lithograph, 23 x 18 in (58 x 46 cm)
Printed by Hitoshi Takatsuki with the assistance of Keith Kirts at The Litho Shop in 1972, Spring Solution thus emerged from 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.
The history of Spring Solution reveals something that can easily be obscured by the apparent spontaneity of Francis's imagery. Its energetic fields of color were not simply transferred from painting into print. They were developed through lithography itself: through seven stones, seven successive printings, custom-formulated inks, extensive proofing, and the close collaboration between Francis and the printers working alongside him. The Litho Shop gave Francis a place where experimentation led to exacting but exciting technical innovations in printmaking. In Spring Solution, that combination of control and chance allowed Francis to translate the immediacy and chromatic intensity of his painting into a medium built fundamentally on process, sequence, and collaboration.
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SAM FRANCIS | (Detail) Spring Solution, 1972. Lithograph, 23 x 18 in (58 x 46 cm)
Photography by Marylene Mey © Estate of the Artist
