Obsessions: Joan Mitchell’s Color as Centrifugal Force
“That particular thing I want can’t be verbalized...I’m trying to define a feeling.”
We find so much inspiration in those for whom there is no option but to create—artists whose work relentlessly bursts out of them, who transform emotion into expression.
The work of painter Joan Mitchell personifies this idea. Born and raised in Chicago, the American painter (1925-1992) made work characterized by a vibrant layering of color, an insistence on lushness and movement. Truly her paintings feel like life, embodied.
Joan Mitchell with her dog Georges du Soleil in Springs, New York, ca. 1953. Photograph by Barney Rosset, Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives. © Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Untitled, 1980. Courtesy of Joan Mitchell Foundation
Mitchell developed the style that would become the basis of her signature throughout the 1950s while living at 60 St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, and would go on to form the foundation of the rest of her career and life, which she spent between New York and France. For Joan, feeling and painting were inarguably interconnected. “Feeling is something more: It’s feeling your existence,” she said. “Painting is a means of feeling ‘living.’” Propping her canvas against the studio wall, “[she] would stand right up against its surface, immersing herself in the physicality of the painterly act before moving far away to the opposite wall to take a prolonged pause and consider her progress” (from “Joan Mitchell’s Village,” via villagepreservation.org).
In other words, by surrendering to color, shape, and imagination—while holding tight to the intuitive center—the real work can emerge. These ideas, and Mitchell’s work, have been guiding us this season…an unlimited well to dip into again and again.
“Joan Mitchell,” by Sarah Roberts, Katy Siegel. Yale University Press, 2021
Joan Mitchell working on Bridge, 1957, in her studio, 60 Saint Marks Place, New York, 1957. Photo: Joan Mitchell and Rudy Burckhardt.
“I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me…and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature, but I would like to paint what it leaves with me.”
Joan Mitchell, Salut Tom, 1979, oil on canvas (four panels), 110 7/16 x 314 1/2 inches, National Gallery of Art.
Places to continue the inspiration:
The archive of the recent show “Monet-Mitchell” at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Reading — Joan Mitchell by Sarah Roberts & Katy Seigel, published by Yale University Press
Viewing— “Joan Mitchell: Portrait of an Abstract Painter,” dir. Marion Cajori, 1992