Patricia Albers on Joan Mitchell | New York Studio School

gentlemen to love the new york studio school she loved that it was an outpost for real painting and she approved of its focus on ambition for the work not for the career back in the 70s when Mitchell was living in France and the New York studio school had a summer program in Paris the students would come out to Jones studio in Vitoria where we see her here often with their teacher Elaine de Kooning and then in March 1988 almost exactly 24 years ago to this day Joan stood presumably on this on this platform and she delivered a lecture cue a really be serious painters be visual painters she told her audience your problems your people to support okay who doesn't but paint paint during that visit and during her many visits to New York in the 70s and the 80s Joan would inevitably make the rounds of artist studios so these would be studios of friends studios of friends of friends some of them students here one painter told me about remembering Joan appearing for the first time in her studio looking glamorous and tough and sunglasses and a long fur coat others remember Joan hobbling around on a cane this was after having had two hip replacements looking tired and rail-thin but always ready to talk painting so put yourself in your studio nervously greeting Joan Mitchell if your painting area is a mess so right away give you hell a studio has to be set up to eliminate distractions we have to target the work in progress so if you then would escape that her rang she might just line your paintings up in a particular order and and tell you to look or she might talk to you about the Gestalt of a work-in-progress not that you shouldn't be aware of individual areas but that you had to shift your focus to the overall configuration or she might speak about painting as a way of feeling living which is not to say that painters shouldn't be aware of what they're doing never paint in a trance she would order you if you're not alert to where you're going then you're just cleaning your brushes on canvas and she'd be simultaneously wise and encouraging and caustic and brutal if she likes you she'd probably invites you to continue the conversation at some bar where she'd get you to drink way too many martinis and if she really liked you she might invite you to her home in baitoey there she is she might buy your plane ticket for you she'd probably give you art supplies maybe tell you you could paint in the old cistern on her property and she might even purchase your work at ridiculously high prices and then hang it along sign of Franz Kline or something and she would rivet her attention on you drawing out your hopes and your fears insisting that you had to crack that emotional shell not be afraid and you'd feel special and yeah the liquor would be flowing and pretty soon you'd be telling her things that you hadn't really intended to tell any other human being you'd be revealing your secrets and then at a certain point things would shift and all of a sudden Joan would be broadcasting your secrets this was likely over dinner with maybe six or eight people suddenly you would be laid out for unmerciful public dissection on the grounds that there was really nothing to be ashamed of and you would be stunned and hurt and you'd probably desperately want out of there only Victoria is off the beaten track and there are no hotels or easy trains back to Paris then later she'd probably seduce you again and then abuse you and then be incredibly kind and then unspeakably rude along the way she would forbid you to waste time wallowing and self-doubt the important thing was to do one's work come on man get crackin let's blow a pic and if you were like most of Mitchell's protégées you'd leave a toy with important insights about yourself and your art so for all of its connections with painting and young painters Joe Mitchell was very fond of the New York studio school and probably she was fond of it too would be because it was here in this building here at way 8 West 8th Street that as a 24 year old painter she walked into the 1950 Whitney annual and was stopped dead in her tracks by Willem de Kooning's attic this was the first time she had ever seen de Kooning's work transformative moment so we will catch up with her there in just a minute first I want to backtrack briefly and tell you that Joan Mitchell was born in 1925 born and raised in Chicago she was the younger daughter of a wealthy ambitious and accomplished family her maternal grandfather was an engineer who built bridges and was also involved in the construction of some of the earliest steel frame skyscrapers so his engineering drawings which Joan kept with her all her life were very important to her for their rigorous construction her mother was a lyric poet who instilled in Joan a lifelong love of poetry poetry was the art form that Mitchell considered most analogous to her own she wanted for her art she said the feeling in a line of poetry that makes it different from a line of prose meaning I think in part that what she was trying to say was inseparable from the way in which she was saying it as her father he was a dermatologist amateur artist and a stern taskmaster who ordered his daughter to earn top grades bring home sports trophies and create accomplished works of art and she did her childhood nickname was bullet-head and it fit but her father also told her that because she was a girl she would always be second-rate when she was 12 he ordered her to choose her life's work she chose artists and made art almost single-mindedly for the next 55 years although when she was in high school she was also a nationally ranked figure skater after she graduated she attended Smith College for two years and then she transferred to the school of the Art Institute of Chicago where she studied anatomy art history and life drawing which was the the core of the that schools curriculum so she's a brush yet compassionate young woman and at this point a new member of the Communist Party toyed with socially concerned art as a student fact much of her personal work consisted during this student period consisted of melancholic and poetic depictions of working men beggars and Waifs inspired by Picasso's paintings of the blue period like old guitarist and by the stark and romantic prince of the German artists kathe Kollwitz who dignified the suffering of the powerless and the poor so Joan admired Kollwitz for her draftsmanship and she also saw her as a kind of role model here was a wealthy artist who was nonetheless committed to social justice and who commanded respect as a champion of the people summers of 1945 in 1946 Jones spent in Mexico 1946 she was living in an apartment in Hana Watteau with a view of la bufa the mountain that she considered her mall so Victoire so she knew saisons work also from the Art Institute and she admired the aliveness and rigor of his landscapes and the way he addressed his shifting perceptions of the world as he moved through it in la bufa and i'm just have a black-and-white of that i don't have a color color image la bufa mitchell like Cezanne conceives of her painting in terms of angled planes sets up linear continuities among objects at various distances and bisects the image playing off rupture and continuity and anticipating the many diptych she would do later in her career after graduating in 1947 mitchell spent 13 months on a fellowship in France where she painted intensely yet she was uncertain as uncertain about her subject matter as she was about her more or less post cubist style 1949 she moved to New York and one of her first paintings here was figure and the city which is probably a self-portrait and in any case such a failure she felt that even as she was working on it she knew she would never again paint the human figure it was then that she walked into the Whitney annual and she was stunned by de Kooning's attic I just say the colors here all the images are a little bit off apologize for that but the best the best we can do so walked into the Whitney annual saw this at this painting here on the left by de Kooning and was stunned first of all because de Kooning's raw muscular anxiety filled canvas which nothing was taken is taken for granted gave her permission to shed the vestiges of an academic manner so this look of freedom and immediacy that that she was seeking didn't happen overnight but she began moving in that in that direction it also gave her permission to acknowledge paint as material substance and to begin to exploit its intrinsic qualities she responded to two de Kooning's leaps of space his interlocking forms and his unstable figure-ground relationships as she was working on cross section of a bridge which was her first important New York painting she jotted down a list almost a poem that suggests her new ideas about space toward blue of red glass landscape edged up outlet March approach to water bridge finally de Kooning opened for her the myriad possibilities of abstraction so bridges had long been a favorite subject thanks to her engineer grandfather but what her earlier bridge images had missed and abstraction could accommodate she now realized or her feelings about bridges so cross-section of a Ridge you know Salvage is Allah de Kooning glimpses of the material worlds you can see there's a patch of water reflections cables abutments and so forth but at the same time evokes the sensation of being near this flux of water and light in the underbelly of an urban bridge 1940s and 1950s the conventional wisdom held that women couldn't really paint the way men could you know it's a kind of biological thing and in any case men had families to support so they should get preferential treatment don't love to tell the story about how the very first time she took her work to a New York dealer and this was back at the end of 1949 she was told gee Joan if only you were French and Mail and dead so for women the game seemed lost in advance okay Joan reasoned so things are really tough for women then women have to be really tough making common cause with other women seem pointless men were in charge so Joan decided she was gonna be one of the boys so she's gonna drink and swear and have affairs and paint with the best of them she claimed that men always helped her more than did women although she was also aware of the fact that since women by a definition couldn't be major players men had nothing to lose so by 1954 then when she was doing works like this one so these kind of very restrained abstracts and voguing feelings about weather and urban space Joan had long since been hanging around the cedar bar she had I'm a member of the artist Club she'd befriended de Kooning France Klein the poet frank O'Hara many others she had also participated in the landmark ninth Street show she had two solo shows in New York and she was a regular at the important stable annual and yet she wasn't living up to her own standards the 1954 was a year of crisis both personal and professional she told her then-boyfriend the painter Michael Goldberg that she'd put all her nickels in the slot machine and nothing was paying off she wanted quote painting as Cathedral and yet her Cathedral remained far distant she also lamented to Goldberg that quote it's not much fun being nuts what did she mean well as far back as kindergarten Joan had been aware where that she perceived the world differently than most people so in kindergarten one day the kindergarten teacher had talked about the red a on the alphabet chart and Joan stood up and said no no it isn't red it's green and so the other kids gave her that you know you're so weird look and so she sat down and clammed up in other words she had synesthesia now I'm sure many of you know those who don't synesthesia is an innate lifelong involuntary condition in which when one of the five senses is stimulated that sense responds and another one does too so some synesthetes for example see sounds others hear flavors still others taste shapes in certain forms of sins stiva things like letters numbers or personalities trigger colors flavors or shapes John Michell had at least four forms of synesthesia where she had colored letters meaning that she saw the letters of the alphabet in color so for example her a was always this kind of fern fern green but if she points out if you can read that that her this chart that she made at one point doesn't really convey the the effects for one thing the colors of synesthesia are the colours of light not the colors of pigment and also she says up there of course in certain words some letters merge or run as into water or Terp the Grays metallic silver cold blue I can't get with these crayons and so forth perhaps I should use oil paint so she also had colored sounds meaning that she saw sounds music included as abstract colored shapes moving as if on a screen in front of her and these were shapes then that would consistently vary with pitch timbre and volume so colored letters colored sounds these are two very common forms of synesthesia in addition she had two rare forms she had colored personalities and colored emotions so for her hope was literally yellow wasn't that hope made her think of yellow it was that yellow was what hope was loneliness was dark green and clingy and depression was silvery white absolute horror she said just horror in addition Joan Mitchell had identic memory which is anecdotally related to synesthesia all the research although the research is still sketchy but what that meant for her was that she stored important memories in what she called her mental suitcase or her mental album of photographs she said I carry my landscapes with me and she was able then to call up these certain memories in their sensory and emotional fullness in effect to relive them such perceptions said Mitchell were very very present for her yet apparently she never knew that synesthesia is a named normal and shared condition which is now known to affect about 5% of the population so synesthesia had been known and studied as far back as the early 19th century but for much of the 20th century it kind of fell by the wayside and it wasn't until 1993 the year after Joan Mitchell's death that the publication of a book titled the man who tasted shapes brought it back to wide scientific and public attention so today the neuroscientists can test for synesthesia so they use among other techniques functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI which measures local oxygenation an indirect sign of neural activity and meanwhile the debate continues over conceptual models for synesthesia in research it seems very promising it promises not only a better understanding of synesthesia itself but also of brain development of the links between emotion and reason and perhaps the very nature of consciousness so Michels crisis of 1954 was severe enough that she made a half-hearted attempt at suicide by 1955 however she had funds she had fought some hard-won battles with herself and she had been able to turn a negative into a positive by now intentionally using her synesthetic perceptions in her art so she started drawing upon these these visual memories memories of particular trees fields rivers lakes and so forth at particular moments color sound her feelings about landscape the flow of consciousness and paint itself became congruent so Hudson Hudson River de liner for instance and again the colors are little off Hudson River day line you can see it appears you kind of coalesce is at the center of the canvas as if it were on the artist plane of consciousness and it uses this newly distilled exuberant luminous color if a painting was successful and John Mitchell felt that Hudson River de line was then she said motion is made still like a fish trapped in ice its trapped in the painting my mind is like an album of photographs and paintings I do not conceive so synesthetes sometimes speak of catharsis and vindication when they learned that others share their condition when a synesthete has compared the moment when she found out that this was a yeah a known a known thing to the moment when the blind and deaf Helen Keller got the connection between w a t e R and that stream of cool water that was running over her hand John never had that kind of experience moreover when that when she talked about her unusual person people assumed that she was speaking metaphorically or that she was revealing in the overly vivid imagination so she turned to writers like real key and Proust and to artists like van Gogh and Kandinsky who seemed to validate her ways of of perceiving the world and she turned to to her own art at one level she was implacably lonely now I hasten to add that to say that Mitchell used her synesthesia in her art is not to say that she's illustrating her synesthetic perceptions or to imply that her neurology explains her art she was a very complex artist and she used every tool that she had at her at her disposal including her synesthesia so if you have you know very precisely colored feelings for example that's you know that's a great tool but it's still a tool you still have to make skilled use of it the point is that to it reduce her to a to a case would be to disregard her visual intelligence her deep knowledge of art history and her eventual creation of a distinct visual language moreover synesthetes can either focus on their synesthetic perceptions or they can tune them out the way we turn out distracting conversations so David Hockney who's another sound color synesthete one who's been tested for four synesthesia using fMRI has says that it said that he has chosen to use his synesthesia only in creating his opera sense so Mitchell and contrast did use her synesthesia extensively but the point is that she too had choices among Mitchell's works of the mid fifties is hemlock that she did in Canada 1956 so it's a work that is no doubt indebted to Mondrian's early tree paintings which she admired for their complex networks of line and lines and there's a compressed architecture of space like Mondrian Mitchell subverts the traditional relationships between figure and ground you do it one way she'd say and then deny it unlike Mondrian she never allows her floating scaffolding to come together as a tree mitchell often read poetry in her studio is a way of shedding her ego and sort of intensifying her her emotions that she was about to paint did she read poetry as she was working on hemlock well who knows but she did reveal that she took the title from Wallace Stevens poem domination of black so it's come from a line that reads yes but the color of the heavy hemlocks so hemlock felt right according to Mitchell because of its dark and blue feeling how did she use her colored feelings or her sound colored synesthesia you know again we don't we don't know though in 1957 she told the then critic Irving Sandler and I quote from his notes I get images from words Wallace Stevens domination of black in any case it's interesting to note that the poems atmosphere of fear and isolation is embodied by these dog tall menacing hemlocks are for Joan Mitchell the very qualities of white and our green and also that her painting like Stevens poem mingles outer and inner worlds so Mitchell denied any interest at all in self-expression you know she would say this is this is painting about landscape it comes from landscape it's about landscape there's nothing to do it's not about me but at the same time she said it was about memories of her feelings so memories of landscape memories of feeling it for Mitchell they were almost one in the same 1959 she moved to Paris and there she began doing these panoramic paintings like the six by 10 foot grande Carriere which is today in the collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art so the large scale kind of disrupted syntax so Michels works then from this period the early 60s I think very easily surpassed the viewers ability to process them in a in a conscious way moreover they shuttled between European pastoralism and New York swagger so the paint is swiped it's dripped it's dry brushed it's slathered it's applied with many different kinds of brushes it's put on with fingers you can see if they're in the bottom right hand corner you know fingers rags sometimes even just you know stuck on like a wad of Gama there were lines like live wires and areas like fine mist for all of its incident and variety her work remained carefully structured so the stereotype of the abstract expressionist painter of course is that she just through her feeling is on on canvas yes Mitchell did paint like the athlete she once was this kind of you know whole body manner of applying the paint she did take advantage of accidents she did make decisions as she went along but she was always working from a mental image you know from this very carefully structured plan for her picture whose evolution she would stop and ponder from the other end of her studio after every few strokes I stop look and listen at railroad tracks as she put it I really want to be accurate so for this kind of accuracy she looked among others to BA whose music she played obsessively in the early 60s like Bach she was seeking something abstract and yet emotionally precise 1962 saw the emergence of pop art movement for which Mitchell had little but scorn she characterized it as all money and no Cathedral paintings of the early 60s it's almost as if the embattled Joan Mitchell is you know saying yeah take that pop art take that this is what real painting looks like and then in 1967 she purchased the property in veto so it's a property large property up on a hill overlooking the Sun and it included up a small house where the impressionist Claude Monet had lived between 1878 and 1881 the neuroscientist Richard's site towel work among others has written about synesthetes typically ecstatic response to nature and nowhere I think is this more evident than in John Mitchell's paintings of the late 60s and early 70s paintings like my landscape to an image poem in which water is paint and paint his water and hills and fields lapse into lines and shapes colors and light then reassert themselves as landscape experienced at a moment of intense and unnameable revelation I want to drink the landscape Mitchell once said of a Terry so this from an alcoholic throughout her career Mitchell looked and learned from everyone and she did a lot of savvy borrowing from a tease for instance whose work she had known and emulated since college she learned how to create visual equivalents for her emotional involvement with particularly escapes using what she thought of as his very felt line and also leaving bits of unpainted canvas among her forms to create a kind of an felt sensation of light from her friend Sam Frances whom she had met in Paris in the mid-50s and whose work had gained new meaning for her since then moving the move to Vito she learned about escaping gravity about opening space to admit white and about trans substantiating pigment into light both artists belonging to what the curator marsha tucker once called an expressive tradition that includes radiance as an image of revelation invito joan also had a large beautiful garden where she grew vegetables and flowers especially her beloved sunflowers so sunflowers were something she intensely intensely felt and so sunflower feelings now become a favorite subject with her young armature sprouting or dying sunflowers often brought her this sensation of psychic merging I become the sunflower the lake the tree she said I no longer exist so back in the early 50s she had tried to deal with and overcome such feelings through psychoanalysis now she's embraced them and uses them in her art so around this same time that Mitchell discovered the work of a Berkeley psychologist by the name of Anton Eisen Zweig who's 1967 book the or the hidden order of art became one of her Bibles this is one she often instructed her young protegees to read so aizen's wig argues that the creative thinker must engage with the seeming chaos of the unconscious from which a complex order will eventually emerge annie also writes that the creative act causes the ego to oscillate between one level and another including the oceanic level where we feel our individual existence lost in mystic union with the universe so it's not surprising that Mitchell's response to baitoey was on the order of n goes to RO two of them experience color light landscape with equal intensity and for both artists painting was a means of salvation from the sort of avalanche of stimuli that they that they had to deal with it was also a kind of salvation from their own aggression Mitchell deeply admired van Gogh she called him you know that perfection and felt that his work epitomized the synthesis of accuracy and intensity to which she aspired and she learned lots of things from Van Gogh you know how to set up complementary and your complementary colors for the kind of dynamic pull how to use bold that yet lyrical dabs stabs and swirls of paint you know bodying forth energy and growth but at the same time manifesting paint as paint or in this case on the right path Stella's pastel and also learning how to impassion nature and objects this last phrase a quote from an essay on van Gogh by Antonin Artaud this was a another work that that Mitchell greatly admired and here that is an excellent example of that kind of impassionate in Mitchell's own work so the 1972 blue territory work that seems to respond to the late winter landscape around her home in vitae and also perhaps draws heavily upon her mental her mental album so what we see here is a kind of snow flurry plain as if at Twilight we see a glaze of yellow there at the bottom glazed with green we see a fallow field it's gonna frosted with lavender like a Monet snow effect and at the upper right we see this purified star-spangled ultramarine reminiscent of Van Gogh's Starry Nights a painting that had long obsessed her blue plays an important role in many of Mitchell's works from the 70s partly because of the qualities of weather and light in the belly of the Sun according to the artist the blue in her paintings is thus in its Lake Michigan - it's rather the feeling I have for these things every Mitchell painting she said began with the Lake Michigan of her Chicago childhood so like identic memory painting for her collapsed time and space it escaped terminations sadness and death thus she began doing paintings that function for her among other things as physical and emotional sanctuaries for herself and her loved ones whether human or canine should explain that Joan was a great lover of dogs she had many dogs over the course of a lifetime at this point she had three rather nippy German Shepard's so a number of paintings she did for dogs and you know always again taking this idea of sanctuary very literally mapping out each of these territory paintings and choosing the colors specifically for the person or the dog that she had in mind in case of blue territory we don't know who that that was I mentioned Monet to whose work Mitchell's is often compared Mitchell both loved and hated Monet but mostly she publicly scorned him she called him Monette and she accused him of being a mediocre colorist and also of not properly tipping the plane forward in his landscapes probably she felt that if she were perceived as being influenced by Monet people would think that this wants tough New York School painter had succumbed to the temptation of life is beautiful abstract Impressionism and it's true the two were up to you know fundamentally different things with Monet painting in plein air trying to capture these shifting atmospheric effects Mitchell on the other hand painting in her studio usually at night to evoke memories of her feelings about particular places that she'd experienced in the past and yet there are so many points of visual reference between the late Monet and the late Mitchell so two were of course responding to the same landscape G very it's just down the road from batery but also both often work the edges of abstraction both weave colors together both mingle water land and sky both use light in uncanny ways and the truth is that Mitchell again learned from everyone including Moe name 1985 Mitchell painted faded air one a painting in precarious balance in which the spiky scroll of pigment on the left pitches diagonally toward the rising tower of scribbles on the right she painted faded air one in a state of despair having recently been diagnosed with cancer of the jaw its emotional trigger she said was quote the tragic and beautiful sunflowers dying in autumn and the fall cool Sun that cold yellow superb she also brings in here cobalt green on the on the right there this unusual semi-transparent sort of blueish green verging on gray that at this point became one of her fetish colors and a very unhappy color she said she also took inspiration for this painting I'm told a friend from Bach's cantata 78 the way that it mounts fabulous so by now Mitchell had been forging ahead for some three decades you know saddled all the while with the somewhat disparaging label second-generation abstract expressionist in the 60s and the 70s she'd had relatively few shows 70s painting had supposedly died in an any case gestural abstraction was hopelessly old-fashioned and lack of irony equally so so the crowded mood moved off in a different direction Mitchell was often seeing only her own footprints in the in the snow if by the 80s painting was back and she had a dynamic New York dealer nonetheless she continued to set her own rules into fine myriad way of following them meeting them so while she was staying true to this path that she'd said in the 50s her art continued to evolve and for her painting was far from exhaustion in fact by the mid 80s her growing awareness of mortality had made it even more urgently important 1986 Joan and her dealer Xavier for COD who was dying of AIDS made an excursion from Vettori to Lili in northern France to see an exhibition of work by honoré Matisse this was work from two Russian collections and among the works that in that show was this one that had been commissioned by a Russian collector for his Moscow home 13 feet wide large painting one that Mitchell had actually seen about 16 years earlier at a Matisse retrospective in Paris from which she had emerged weeping with emotion what spoke to her I'm sure many things in the Dead Dolls but color for one for another the paintings kinetic quality this kind of buoyant circularity the fact that it's simultaneously moving and still upon her return to a toy she created the Leela suite of paintings in her now preferred format of diptych consisting of two vertical panels so here we've got nine nine feet high thirteen feet across so nine by thirteen so it's a format that she liked for lots of reasons among other things because it allows her to play off circularity and rectangularity play off that organic kinds of organic form she uses with that vertical cut unity and interruption it's a painting that I think is opulent and tough structured and free moving and still so here then is that fish trapped in ice so clearly its indebted to Matisse's Liddell's but perhaps it's also indebted to the cathedral of Beauvais where mitchell and for COD had stopped enroute to wheel so john mitchell had always been an enthusiastic visitor to cathedrals and in fact she had in her possession an invitation from the French Ministry of Culture to do a stained-glass window for the Cathedral of NAVAIR in central France eventually she accepted but unfortunately that that never happened probably because of her illness she loved Beauvais which she once called that crazy late Gothic unfinished superb nutty monument to God so unfinished referring to the fact that the vaults collapsed in the 13th century and were never completely rebuilt painting as Cathedral was also a favorite Joan Mitchell metaphor one that she used in her personal letters and conversations as early as the 1950s and which shows up again for instance in a text which her companion and housemate the composer she's Oboro wrote about Mitchell's 83 84 Grande Valley suite a group of paintings ignited in Burroughs words into sonorous luminous radiating cathedrals now gentlemen chill could be very quick to bring things down to earth what happens when you paint an interviewer once asked her nothing she characteristically answered my hands get awful dirty she was not a religious person in fact she was an atheist she unflinchingly acknowledged our aloneness in the cosmos dead is dead as Dave hickeys pointed out Mitchell's dying sunflowers don't swoon or wilts they decay into weeds and sticks in what since then was she's seeking painting as Cathedral well a Cathedral of course consists of stone and glass structure and light which could be seen as analogous to Mitchell's quest for accuracy and intensity Cathedral is a place a sanctuary as painting was for her and a cathedral is both a material and a spiritual program Mitchell told another interviewer that spirituality is a hokey word yet she went on to bemoaned of that painting had lost some of its spirituality which is what it had once been about another key book for Joan Mitchell was Hugo von hoffmanstal 's fictional Lord Chandos letter in which a certain Lord Chandos renounces writing because words have become painfully inadequate at the same time he's realized that quote a watering can a hero left standing in a field a dog in the Sun a run-down churchyard any of these can become the vessel for my revelation he continues once again words desert me for it is indeed something entirely unnamed even barely nameable which at such moments reveals itself to me filling like a vessel any casual object of my daily surroundings with an overflowing flood of higher life such was Joan Mitchell's experience it's true that her sunflowers decay into weeds and sticks but not until she has fully felt their living and their dying not until something entirely unnamed even barely nameable has filled them like a vessel with an overflowing flood of higher life so fully in fact as to cause her to lose her own sense of self would I become the sunflower she said Mitchell's own Cathedral her higher life had nothing to do with the great beyond or with the ultimate meaning of life or death but rather with an intense it's a fight aliveness here and now as suggested by the title ec here of one of her very last paintings done as she was dying of cancer a cathedral requires both powerful feelings religious feelings in the case of a Beauvais and the desire and ability to give them material expression worthy of their significance a stone is a stone until it becomes part of a cathedral and then it's also something more similarly ICI Springs from Mitchell's vivid awareness of the particulars of this world which achieve their full expression their presence through abstract painting NEC paint is emphatically paint get it also become something more thing expressed is essentially the unexpressible as for Mitchell synesthesia because synesthesia is relatively rare it's sometimes assumed to be a higher state of consciousness yet to live with it every day is to take it for granted the way we take left or right handed us for granted so I don't mean to suggest that Mitchell somehow lived in a rien chanted world only that hers was a visually and emotionally intense life experience rife with both pleasure and pain and that she was wise and courageous enough to privilege that experience in her art she believed only in painting like music she said painting is beyond life and death it is another dimension thank you

Channel: New York Studio School

Views: 9,836

Keywords: Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell, NYSS, New York Studio School, Art History, Painting, Abstract Expressionism, 20th Century Painting

Id: 3Vz0ZIsnRSA

Length: 57min 31sec (3451 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020