PAINT FOR THE PAINTER

Daniel Cytron

I looked around before cleaning up the studio. It was well lit because of a large skylight in the middle of the ceiling. There was a chair, tables, and an area that looked like an old kitchen that you would find in a Masonic lodge. He painted on watercolor paper, large cotton, and linen canvas. He didn’t really clean up after himself. He had very fine quality brushes. They were European, not what was sold in Los Angeles in the ordinary art stores. “Pretty exotic!” I said to myself. “This guy is after my own heart.”

There were bowls of colored water on the floor and in and on the sink. Paintbrushes with half-hardened paint and evaporated liquid filled the bowls. “These things have been sitting for some time,” I said to Ardison. Ardison Phillips had asked me to come with him to work in Sam’s studio. Sam sent us to his studio in Ocean Park to move his painting materials from a small inner room into a bigger inner space on the second floor. Richard Diebenkorn also had used these rooms, and we moved his canvases that were still in this room to a new rear studio. In the process of organizing and cleaning, I learned that Sam Francis used oil paint, watercolor, acrylic-oil emulsions, gouache, egg tempera, and water-based acrylic paint. At the end of the day, we constructed a “straw man” out of Sam’s painting clothes, hat, and shoes in one corner and organized his new studio with paint, brushes, paper, and small-to-large canvases neatly arranged and ready when he next used the room. That was in 1967; I began as his studio assistant that week.

Years later I went back to school and obtained an additional degree, this time in paint technology. I wanted to know how to make my own paint. With this knowledge, I could also provide Sam with what he needed: colors too expensive and rare for the normal hobbyist manufacturer to sell to the public, and large quantities of those colors in five-gallon containers that were never available to an artist. I could give Sam what he wanted most—quality and exclusivity. My role transformed till we were partners in an enterprise that allowed me to produce colors for my paint and at the same time give Sam a unique palette that other artists could not duplicate.

If there was any person who raised the bar of expectation, it was Sam. “I want the best!” he would say all the time. Our collaboration liberated that quality. I supplied him with watercolors, gouache, acrylic-vinyl paint, egg tempera, oil paint, etching inks, lithographic printing inks, and color dispersions for his oil paintings, monoprints, lithographs, etchings, and water-based paintings on paper and canvas.

I worked with Sam from 1967 until his death. I saw the intensity of his painting, the focus, and the dance that he would do while in the process of painting, printmaking, or drawing. My time with Sam was as his helpmate. I provided those special things that he made into his art. This show is an affirmation of Sam Francis’s legacy.

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