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Whale White. Later, in paintings like Blue Ball series—Untitled, 1961, the diaphanous mists and blots of color were abolished in favor of a snowy white field on which dense blue circular shapes were deployed; later still, the series that included Untitled, 1970, pushed the activity of color from the center of the canvas altogether, leaving the white void itself as the subject, speckled and edged with exquisitely laced drifts of color that Francis blurred, wet into wet, in imitation of Japanese sumi ink painting.
In 1957 Francis titled a canvas The Whiteness of the Whale, an open invitation to connect his work to Melville, who wrote of Moby Dick in a celebrated passage: "But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness...why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind." Naturally, to invoke Melville does not make Sam Francis the Melville of painting. Yet his best work sometimes touches an epic quality that makes sense of his ambitions. "There is no conflict in my painting," Francis once remarked. "The conflict is in my life. I feel trapped by gravity. I would like to fly, to soar, to float like a cloud, but I am tied down to a place. Painting is a way out."
∎R.H.