Sam Francis died in 1994; so "Fairly Old" means prior to 1990.

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I took an art survey course in college in the early 1960's, but none of it got to me, probably because the course spent about thirty minutes on post-19^th Century Art. And a good twenty years passed afterwards before I found a book of Magritte paintings upstairs at Cody's in Berkeley which was so satisfying I didn't look at non-Surrealist art for about 25 years. Then around 2003, I started looking at Christies and Sotheby's auctions online, making slide-shows and backgrounds out of the art I liked, and after a brief affair with Fauvism, I got wiped out by Abstract Expressionism. It was then that I made friends with Sam Francis' art.

I'd been living in and around the San Francisco Bay area since 1963, and I remember thinking "Sam probably named himself after the place where he made most of his art." I still don't know if that's true, but of course, whether it's true only matters like whether art is true matters.  

There's an old Italian Mob saying: Keep Your Friends Close, and Keep Your Enemies Closer. I've always thought of Sam Francis as a close friend:

There follow seven abstract expressionist paintings by the immortal Sam Francis, non-geometrical in the style which originally appealed to me and which to this day I think of as the "Sam Francis style."

Enjoy:

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Authors Bio:
I have a law degree (Stanford, 66') but have never practiced. Instead, from 1967 through 1977, I tried to contribute to the revolution in America. As unsuccessful as everyone else over that decade, in 1978 I went to work for the U.S. Forest Service in San Francisco as a Clerk-Typist, GS-4. I was active in the USFS's union for several years, including a brief stint as editor of The Forest Service Monitor, the nationwide voice of the Forest Service in the National Federation of Federal Employees. Howsoever, I now believe my most important contribution while editor of the F.S.M. was bringing to the attention of F.S. employees the fact that the Black-Footed Ferret was not extinct; one had been found in 1980 on a national forest in the Colorado. In 2001 I retired from the USFS after attaining the age of 60 with 23 years of service. Stanford University was evidently unimpressed with my efforts to make USFS investigative reports of tort claim incidents available to tort claimants (ie, "the public"), alleging the negligence of a F.S. employee acting in the scope of his/her duties caused their damages, under the Freedom of Information Act. Oh well. What'cha gonna do?