Untitled c. 1960

This is an untitled work on paper by Joan Mitchell, made with lithographic ink. Look at how the gestures build up, one over the other; inky blacks and blues wrestling it out, surrounded by all that white space. It's like she's searching for something, maybe an emotion or a feeling, scraping and smearing the ink to see what might emerge. I wonder what it was like for her, standing there, pulling these marks out of herself, each one a little leap into the unknown. See that heavy horizontal stroke at the top? It’s so decisive, a real statement, like saying "this is how it is." Then, below, those messy, tangled lines feel like the aftermath, the confusion and complexity that follows any big declaration. Mitchell's work is like a conversation with other painters across time. The process of painting is this kind of embodied expression that embraces ambiguity, allowing for multiple interpretations.