Monday’s Muse: Helen Frankenthaler

One of my best friends was married inside an art gallery on the weekend, set against a beautiful abstract painting bursting with bright blushed colours and bleeding watercolor-esque lines. The only painting on the wall, it really did create a perfect setting for two people to declare their love for each other…

This piece reminded me of the beautiful work from American abstract expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler. Large in scale and beautifully unafraid of colour. As a celebrated painter since the early 1950s, Frankenthaler introduced the technique of painting directly onto an unprepared canvas, allowing the fabric to absorb the oil paint and leave a halo effect around each area. I love her palette choices, her brave strokes and energetic lines, and her rejection towards any barriers the art world at that time projected.

“A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.” – Helen Frankenthaler

Images via the bohemian.com