Sam Gilliam obituary

Abstract artist whose ‘draped’ canvases hover between painting and sculptureOne day in 1968, Sam Gilliam was leaning out of his studio window in Washington DC as a neighbour hung her washing. The painter, who has died aged 88, was bewitched by how the damp material sagged under its own weight, and the clothes and sheets billowed from the clothesline in the wind. What if he could make the canvases of his abstract paintings do something similar?Gilliam was already beginning to make a n