Monday’s Muse: Joan Mitchell

“It’s death. It’s hospitals. It’s my terrible nurses. You can add in Melville, ‘Moby Dick’ a chapter on white. White is absolute horror. It is just the worst.” — Joan Mitchell, thoughts on the colour white.

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Inspired by the gestural painting style of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, Joan Mitchell’s works are celebrated for their compositional rhythms, brave use of colour combinations and sweeping brushstrokes – all suggesting a mood of wild improvisation.

“What excites me when I’m painting is what one color does to another and what they do to each other in terms of space and interaction.”

As well as the emotive characters of her paintings, she would also play with contrasting concepts such as light and dark, space and density, or growth and decay. It is her powerful use of colour and its placement, though, that I find so interesting. By using a single colour, found nowhere else in her painting, she could anchor an entire piece, somehow giving the painting back its compositional balance.

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Joan Mitchell lived and worked from a house in Vetheuil, France. Prior to this, she lived in Paris, and in the 1950s she worked from New York, where she was one of the few women painters in ‘The Club’; the renowned enclave of New York painters whose membership included de Kooning, Rothko and Pollock. Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, Helen Frankenthaler and Sonia Gechtoff, she was one of her era’s few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim.

But perhaps my most favourite piece of information I’ve heard about Mitchell, was that she worked primarily at night and in complete solitude, except for the company of her beloved dogs. German Shepherds, of course. And with that knowledge, I’m pretty sure it is safe to say that Joan Mitchell would have been one very cool lady.

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{Image above: Joan Mitchell at her home in Vétheuil, France. Photo by Edouard Boubat, 1984.}