Joan Mitchell

When Yoriko invited me to see an exhibit of Joan Mitchell, an artist from the late 20th century, I  was unfortunately unfamiliar with her work. As someone who is drawn to representational art, I have come to appreciate the genius of this remarkable abstract artist.

 

What is remarkable about Mitchell is that while her paintings are inspired by real life, cityscapes, gardens, fields, flowers, trees lakes, what she paints are the feelings and memories of these things. She translates a particular aspect of an encounter with a natural phenomenon but as it is seen but as it is experienced, the dark boughs of hemlock into swaths of viridian and black, the vista of a harbor into blues and red shapes held together a net of white paint, or the pathos of loss of her sister in up steaked greens and pinks. She does this paint as the tool and language, masterfully layering paint on a canvas in transparent washes and watery drips, bold gestures of pigment, thick. buttery layers of paint, stipples and dribble so of viscous paint, carefully choosing her palette, composition and form. When examining her painting, one can see her movement in the gestures she used to apply the paint or the thought behind the layers of washes and impasto.  She often spoke of the painting determining where she would lay paint or it revealed her own inner dialogue with paint, brush and canvas.

This is the last figurative painting Mitchell painted.

Evenings on 73^rd Street

 

This painting takes is name after the many unruly evenings Mitchell spent with her friend Hal Fronden and their circle of painters and poets at his 73^rd Street Apartment. The art here is carefully built up. “The freedom in my work is quite controlled. I don’t close my eyes and hope for the best…. I want to know what my brush is doing.”

 

I’m always up against a wall looking for a view… I carry my landscapes around with me.” Often working meticulously and intentionally, she layered muted colors to create interwoven spaces that were not representational, but  “accurate.”

 

To the Harbormaster

 

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

Though my ship was on the way it got caught up

In some moorings. I am always tying up

And then deciding to depart.

--Frank O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster”

Blue Tree

Mitchell once ”saw this cypress tree against an ochre wall… It was so blac ant the ochre wall was a pale, pale ochre and it moved me.”

Ode to Joy

 

We shall have everything we want and there’ll

be no more dying/ on the pretty plains or in the

supper clubs

--Frank O’Hara, “Ode to Joy,” 1958

 

The solitude I find in my studio is one of plentitude.  I am enough for myself.  I live fully there.

 

You put color down and you look at it. This has to do with seeing… Once I start painting I make a painting. Painting takes over at one point.

--Joan Mitchell.

Sunflower VI

 

Mitchell enjoyed how the sunflowers rose above her like trees and studded her property haphazardly, at odds with her formal French gardens. “They look so wonderful when young, and they are so very moving when they are dying. I don’t like fields of sunflowers. I like them

alone, or, of course, painted by van Gogh.

La lande

 

La Lande hung in Mitchell’s dining room for years, often with a vase of flowers nearby. The painting feature the bold colors that match the vivacity of nature in bloom: the composition is roughly divided into tree bands: white, marigold and a mix of lavender and greens. While much smaller and more intimate, it has the shares the same emotional power of her more expansive works.