Preview our Spring 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
SAM FRANCIS FOUNDATION
Cobalt Blue: Writings from the Papers of Sam Francis
By Sam Francis. Edited by Jaime Robles. Introduction by Nancy Mozur.
A new selected writings from the Californian abstract expressionist famed for his colorful lyricism and dynamic painting
This volume beautifully combines the artist's writing with his works on paper in an elegantly designed book. Focusing on principles expressed in his acclaimed Saturated Blue, this volume includes writings from Francis' journals that have never been published before.
Sam Francis (1923–94) painted images with words as well as pigments. He approached art as a mediation between divine inspiration and human existence, and a guiding notion was the philosopher's stone, or Lapis Philosophorum. His writings took the form of aphorisms, poetry, dream memories and prose, each providing insight into his visual art. His publishing project, the Lapis Press, allowed Francis to pursue his love of writing and discover new ways to marry the brilliance of words with the visual. That ethos is reflected in the superb design of this collection. The production used a new seven-color print technology to create plates with added vibrancy and color density.
Featured image is reproduced from 'Cobalt Blue: Selected Writings of Sam Francis.'
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Belles & Rebelles
Colorful and abstract, his paintings and words are as meditative and meaningful to the eyes and minds of the reader as they were to Francis himself.
Eléna Rivera
For Francis words, images and symbolism were a mystery, a Japanese Zen Koan, something to uncover, discover, about himself. The exchange between writing and painting, was for him all part of the same engagement, the same enigma regarding life, the same riddle. To read his writing is to be drawn in to a vast visionary world that grapples with the mystifying problems of existence and the immensity of the imagination.
Litter
Steve Spence
There’s a lyric quality to much of this writing and a deep concern with dreams and the unconscious as a way of unblocking the ‘rational mind’ in response to the ills of the world ... he had a belief in the power of art as a positive force for change in the world and his prodigious output can be seen in this light which doesn’t in any way diminish its aesthetic substance.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
Featured image is reproduced from Cobalt Blue, the Sam Francis Foundation's beautiful new clothbound collection of selected writings by the west coast abstract expressionist, whom we honor today on Veteran's Day. "Dear R," one entry reads, "What we want is to make something that fills utterly the sight and can't be used only to make life bearable. If the arts of the past were, in a way, a means of making the unbearable bearable, or the visible sumptuous, then let us now strip away from the yellow that intention. This painting is for the greatest cloud that ever soared over the inlaid sea.
Do you lie dreaming under the huge canvas?" continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 7.5 x 10 in. / 184 pgs / 40 color / 4 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $75 GBP £50.00 ISBN: 9781733966306 PUBLISHER: Sam Francis Foundation AVAILABLE: 11/19/2019 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: Out of stock TERRITORY: WORLD
Cobalt Blue: Writings from the Papers of Sam Francis
Published by Sam Francis Foundation. By Sam Francis. Edited by Jaime Robles. Introduction by Nancy Mozur.
A new selected writings from the Californian abstract expressionist famed for his colorful lyricism and dynamic painting
This volume beautifully combines the artist's writing with his works on paper in an elegantly designed book. Focusing on principles expressed in his acclaimed Saturated Blue, this volume includes writings from Francis' journals that have never been published before.
Sam Francis (1923–94) painted images with words as well as pigments. He approached art as a mediation between divine inspiration and human existence, and a guiding notion was the philosopher's stone, or Lapis Philosophorum. His writings took the form of aphorisms, poetry, dream memories and prose, each providing insight into his visual art. His publishing project, the Lapis Press, allowed Francis to pursue his love of writing and discover new ways to marry the brilliance of words with the visual. That ethos is reflected in the superb design of this collection. The production used a new seven-color print technology to create plates with added vibrancy and color density.
