Painter Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) gained acclaim early in her career with a stunning skill for Abstract Expressionism. Competing with a bevy of older, renowned, mostly male painters such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline in the historically significant 1951 Ninth Street Exhibition, Mitchell held her own. With nature playing the main character in her work, visible through abstract knots referencing water, trees, and florals.

Mitchell’s late paintings are especially emblematic of her relationship to her environment—her physical surroundings were linked to an emotional landscape, as if her observations of nature were filtered through an internal sieve. As she said, “My paintings [are]…about a feeling that comes to me from the outside, from landscape…My paintings have to do with feelings.”

The last years of Mitchell’s life were marked by the deaths of friends and family. Her own health struggles began in the early 80s with the appearance of cancer and painting quickly became both a refuge and an ally. While the late work still evinces a distinct confidence of gesture and mark-making, it is further characterized by an increased sense of freedom.

Often presented in diptych format, Mitchell’s expansive late canvases remain evocative of the landscape, but also provide room to explore a more liberated mark. Brushstrokes are energetic and colors vivid. Punctuated by airy, unpainted areas of canvas, the works express a sensation of urgency and immediacy, as if in rejection, denial and resistance to her failing health. Through her late work, she strived for immortality, for a merging with the timelessness and formlessness of nature: “I become the sunflower, the lake, the tree. I no longer exist.” Click here for more info.

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