gail sibley

Somehow, the painter Joan Mitchell (1926-1992) has come to my attention. I now have a book of her work, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, that was published concurrently with an exhibition of the same name at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2002. I leaf through the pages, drawn more and more deeply into her work.

 

MY RESPONSE TO HER WORK

I respond emotionally to the colour, the luscious paint (the book provides some closeups some of which you’ll see below), the freedom that is evoked in her broad gestural and often calligraphic brushstroke. These are BIG works averaging nine feet and upward!! The sheer boldness takes my breath away. There’s no room for fear doing this work, only commitment to risk and truth. And you know from my last blog how interested I am in pushing myself to take risk. I look at these works and wonder at their power and am in awe of their creator, a woman abstract expressionist in a time of men. I guess that’s why I hadn’t heard of her before. It’s that gender issue raising its murky head.

 

HER WORK

Let’s take a look at some of her work. I’m telling you it sure was difficult to make choices of what to include here. As these images are taken from The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, some paintings cover two pages and so you see the centre line, sometimes I was unable to take a ‘squared up’ photo – I apologize for these imperfect representations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

LA GRANDE VALLEE

In 1983/84 at age 57-58, Joan Mitchell created ‘La Grand Vallee,’ a cycle of 21 paintings created in 13 months. Remarkable! According to my reading, these works were not conceived as a series. “Rather, her vision of this enchanted landscape drove her to paint, and she ceased only when she had fully exhausted all possibilities of its expression…..They represent Mitchell’s most sustained exploration of the ‘allover’ approach, in which the entire canvas is covered with colour from edge to edge.” (From essay by Yvette Y. Lee in The Paintings of Joan Mitchell)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SHORT BIO OF JOAN MITCHELL

I have just started reading the book, The Paintings of Joan Mitchell (it arrived today!), and so I’m just getting to know Joan. Briefly, she was born in Chicago and grew up in an affluent family, her mother a poet and writer, her father a doctor. She earned a BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. After a travelling fellowship to Europe for a year in 1947, she returned to New York intending to study under Hans Hoffman but objected to his way of erasing and “correcting” students’ work (!).

 

Joan then went to France and lived there 1948-1949 returning to New York in 1950 at the height of abstract expressionism and the work of Jackson Pollock (1912-1951), famous since a Life Magazine article in August 1949 asked “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”. She met and was mentored by Franz Kline (1910-1962) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), both of whom I greatly admire. Through the 50s, she showed in New York while dividing her time between Paris and New York. In 1955 she met the French Canadian painter Jean-Paul Riopelle (1923-2002) and they became lovers/companions until 1979. In 1959 she set up a studio in Paris. After her mother died in 1967 (her father died in 1963), she had money to buy a house and garden in Vetheuil, a small town northwest of Paris. This was her home until she died of lung cancer 30 October 1992. She received awards and citations, was given prizes and retrospectives. With so much acclamation, you’d think I would have heard of her. Nope. Not until now.

 

She had quite the character. John Ashbery wrote in the forward to the book, Joan Mitchell 1992, “… Joan was a tough lady, a hard drinker, hard on her friends and harder on herself. Yet her thorniness made you want to hug her, as one thinks (twice) of embracing a rosebush: Such passion is hard to resist, even when it confronts you in uncomfortable ways.”

 

 

 

Painting is the opposite of death, it permits one to survive, it also permits one to live.

~ Joan Mitchell

 

Click here to see an interesting video taken at a show of Joan’s last works. It gives a sense of their immensity. The filmmaker also makes some interesting observations that come from seeing the work in the real.

 

I’d so love to know more about her painting process, the progression from blank canvas to finish. Perhaps in the book I’m reading more will be said.

 

There’s so much I could show and say and suggest and question (for instance, can a ‘nice’ girl create work of such potency?), but this is a blog, so that’s it!

 

Here’s the book I’ve been using as my primary source:

 

You know I’d love to hear what you think of Joan Mitchell’s work. Are you as drawn to it as I am or are you questioning, confused. Whatever it is, I’d love to hear about it!!

 

Thanks for following my blog,

 

~ Gail

 

PS. This is the other book I referenced:

 

 

PPS. I just discovered that there is a very well thought of film about Joan Mitchell. Maybe I’ll treat myself (if the library doesn’t have it.