La Primavera Fredda (Cold Spring) 1988

Sam Francis made this painting, *La Primavera Fredda* or *Cold Spring*, with oil on canvas. It's got this overall wash of turquoise, like a swimming pool in Iceland, and then these little floating islands of color, each one unique. I can imagine Sam Francis just letting the paint drip and pool, coaxing these shapes into being. He must have been in conversation with the canvas, reacting to what emerged. There are splatters and scratches of cerulean and crimson and lemon yellow disrupting the surface, which seems to resist any easy reading. Is it a map? A garden? A dreamscape? Francis's mark-making really gets me thinking about Helen Frankenthaler's soak-stain paintings, where she poured thinned paint onto unprimed canvas. These artists were all about expanding our sense of what painting could be. And so, a painting becomes a site of inquiry, one painter talking to another across time, a continuous flow of creativity!