JOAN MITCHELL, Beauvais. 1986, oil on canvas diptych 110 1/4 x 157 1/2 inches

Transcription

1 JOAN MITCHELL, Beauvais 1986, oil on canvas diptych 110 1/4 x 157 1/2 inches

2 Joan Mitchell Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 and earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in In the early 1950 s she participated in the vibrant downtown New York art scene and spent time with many other painters and poets. It was during this time in New York that she began to paint in a way known as abstract expressionism. In 1955, she moved to the city of Paris, France and in 1967, from the city to a house in a small town near Paris called Vétheuil. At Vétheuil she had more space to paint and was surrounded by nature. Her house sat up on a hill overlooking the River Seine. The property had many big trees and high gardens in which she grew all kinds of plants and flowers, among them sunflowers which she loved in particular. The companionship of her dogs was very important to Joan; she owned many throughout her life and their names can often be found in the titles of her paintings. Joan Mitchell painted throughout her entire life. In addition to oil paintings, she made drawings, especially with pastels and watercolors, and did several different kinds of printmaking. She died in Medium & Technique Lake Michigan, Photo Barney Rosset Oil paint is made of pigments - substances, often dry powders, that have rich, strong color - mixed with vegetable oils. Colors are very carefully selected and placed in Beauvais. Joan Mitchell would stand back from the canvas and look for long periods of time, decide where the next mark should go, then approach the canvas to place color quickly and confidently. Each mark she made reflects the movement of her arm and body. The arc of her arm can be seen in the brushstrokes in many of her paintings, especially at the top where she was extending her reach. New York, Photo Rudolph Burckhardt Her work & Beauvais Joan Mitchell s artworks communicate, through color and gesture, the feelings and memories of people, places and things in her life that were important to her. She said, My paintings repeat a feeling abut Lake Michigan, or water, or fields...it s more like a poem...and that s what I want to paint. The myriad things that comprised and moved within her landscapes - water, sky, trees, flowers, dogs - created images and memories that all went into her paintings. Beauvais, titled after a town north of Paris that has a well-known gothic cathedral, is a large painting that evokes a vivid landscape with an expansive sense of space. White brushstrokes around the edges of each panel, mingled with a bright, soft yellow, create an atmospheric sensation of weather, water and sky permeated with light. The paint in Beauvais suggests matter in flux between physical states. Oranges, greens and browns seem more solid and anchored in the foreground. The areas of blue paint push forward as well, yet lead like passages back into and beyond the painting. The blues feel permeable, calling to mind a material through which light, objects, or bodies may pass: perhaps solid like a lens or colored glass, liquid like a body of water, or open like air and sky. Vétheuil, Photo Édouard Boubat Questions for discussion 1. List five words that come to mind when you look at Beauvais. 2. Which colors make the painting feel warm? Which make it feel cool? 3. Which colors seem to come forward and which seem to recede? 4. Imagine a landscape. Try to identify every part of it that you can. 5. Identify several different kinds of weather. What colors do you associate with each? Image of Beauvais is Estate of Joan Mitchell.

3 JOAN MITCHELL, Merci 1992, oil on canvas diptych 110 1/4 x 141 1/2 inches

4 Joan Mitchell Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 and earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in In the early 1950 s she participated in the vibrant downtown New York art scene and spent time with many other painters and poets. It was during this time in New York that she began to paint in a way known as abstract expressionism. In 1955, she moved to the city of Paris, France and in 1967, from the city to a house in a small town near Paris called Vétheuil. Medium & Technique Véthueil, Photo Marabeth Cohen-Tyler At Vétheuil she had more space to paint and was surrounded by nature. Her house sat up on a hill overlooking the River Seine. The property had many big trees and high gardens in which she grew all kinds of plants and flowers, among them sunflowers which she loved in particular. The companionship of her dogs was very important to Joan; she owned many throughout her life and their names can often be found in the titles of her paintings. Joan Mitchell painted throughout her entire life. In addition to oil paintings, she made drawings, especially with pastels and watercolors, and did several different kinds of printmaking. She died in Her work & Merci I work out of several feelings. Hopefully something to do with love...love of the river, love of the doggies... Merci (1992), which means thank you in French, is one of the latest and most concise paintings in Mitchell s body of work. To feel gratitude is to recognize one s reliance upon things outside of oneself; for Mitchell it was a way of connecting with nature and the things she loved. She said, Van Gogh...gives gratitude to the sunflower because it exists. I give gratitude to trees because they exist, or to [dogs, the river, flowers], and that s all my painting is about. Merci s elevated passages of electric color have significant weight, yet attain lightness through the balance of other formal elements: of warm and cool colors, of color against white canvas, of vertical brushstrokes that follow the path of gravity and organic, knotted brushstrokes that float. The size and fluidity of the gestures indicate a physical rigor and sense of urgency; Mitchell was ill and knew she had little time left to paint. Saturated, brightly colored orange and blue brushstrokes connect with the empty white ground on which they float by areas of desaturated color in each panel - lavender on the left and a faint blue on the right. One can imagine that Joan Mitchell, in painting Merci, may have experienced a perfected sense of freedom and release, the kind that is attained by pushing mind and body to the extent of their powers. Merci is an expression of gratitude, but also an offering. Merci presents the gift of resolution and an experience of looking that harmonizes opposing forces: gravity and lightness, being and nothing, cohesion and disintegration. New York, Photo Rudolph Burckhardt Oil paint is made of pigments - substances, often dry powders, that have rich, strong color - mixed with vegetable oils. This mixture creates a paint that glides smoothly across a surface. In Merci this is very important because Mitchell was able to place color quickly over a large area of the surface. The large, unbroken brushstrokes indicate that Mitchell was making marks that reflect the physical limits of her own body. Véthueil, Questions for discussion 1. Do you feel a sense of balance within Merci? How does Mitchell achieve this? 2. How does Mitchell layer and combine warm and cool colors? What is the resulting effect of these combinations? 3. If you wanted to express gratitude through a painting, what colors would you use? Why? 4. Compare the brushstrokes between the cobalt blue areas on the left and right panels. How do they differ? How do the differing brushstrokes give the blue area of color a different feeling or personality? Image of Merci is Estate of Joan Mitchell.

5 JOAN MITCHELL, Sunflowers , oil on canvas diptych 102 1/4 x 157 1/2 inches

6 Joan Mitchell Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago in 1925 and earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in In the early 1950 s she participated in the vibrant downtown New York art scene and spent time with many other painters and poets. It was during this time in New York that she began to paint in a way known as abstract expressionism. In 1955, she moved to the city of Paris, France and in 1967, from the city to a house in a small town near Paris called Vétheuil. Medium & Technique Véthueil, Photo Nancy Crampton At Vétheuil she had more space to paint and was surrounded by nature. Her house sat up on a hill overlooking the River Seine. The property had many big trees and high gardens in which she grew all kinds of plants and flowers, among them sunflowers which she loved in particular. The companionship of her dogs was very important to Joan; she owned many throughout her life and their names can often be found in the titles of her paintings. Joan Mitchell painted throughout her entire life. In addition to oil paintings, she made drawings, especially with pastels and watercolors, and did several different kinds of printmaking. She died in Oil paint is made of pigments substances, often dry powders, that have rich, strong color mixed with vegetable oils. This mixture creates a paint that glides smoothly across a surface, and can be applied quickly. Depending upon the relative dryness of paint beneath each new mark, colors will layer over one another, or mix to form a new color. Each mark in Sunflowers was made quickly and confidently, however, each was carefully planned in order to create diverse but harmonious bursts of color, echoing the energetic growth of the sunflower. New York, Photo Rudolph Burckhardt Her work & Sunflowers The titles of Joan Mitchell s works, attributed after a painting was complete, can be seen as an indication of the kinds of feelings and remembered experiences Mitchell was working with while she painted. Throughout her life she referred to sunflowers in her paintings; she said of them, [they] are like people to me. The bloom of the sunflower has a particularly concentrated mass. Pushed upward on tall, spindly stalks, it blossoms, droops, falls apart and fades. Mitchell s late sunflower paintings reflect the feeling of the flower s life cycle: its immense gathering of energy into the brightly colored flower and its subsequent dissipation. In Sunflowers, brushstrokes collect in spherical forms, Véthueil, Photo Édouard Boubat which seem to pull paint from the white spaces of the canvas. These entwined bundles of paint and space convey the sense of matter held together by the tension between attraction and dissolution. Paint scatters and collects, gathers and expands, allowing the forms in Sunflowers to breathe. In her late works, Mitchell presents us with a kind of certainty regarding paint, color, form and balance that is also a corporeal certainty that in life and nature, contrasting entities and forces both contradict and agree, and can, through the medium of paint, unify. Ultimately, Mitchell is celebrating and expressing gratitude for the sunflower. Questions for discussion 1. What do you think Joan Mitchell meant when she said that sunflowers were like people to her? 2. What are some opposites and contradictions that you can think of? How might you represent them in separate artworks? How might you represent their coexistence? 3. Consider the life cycle of the sunflower. How does Mitchell convey this cycle in the structure of Sunflowers? 4. How does this painting celebrate the existence of sunflowers? Image of Sunflowers is Estate of Joan Mitchell.