Indian Summer 1967

Helen Frankenthaler made this painting, Indian Summer, by staining the canvas with colour. Look at those blocks of earth tones! That ochre, the navy, the kind of faded rose…you get the feeling that she’s working in the spirit of landscape painting. You can see the movement of her arm, the way the brush must have dragged and pooled. I can almost feel Frankenthaler there, in her studio, surrounded by her colours, pouring and pushing them around. You can just imagine her, stepping back, squinting, maybe tilting her head to one side. Painters are always looking at each other’s paintings, dead or alive. When Frankenthaler made this work, she may have been thinking of the way that Mark Rothko’s colour fields create this sense of space and light. The colour here seeps into the canvas, creating a sense of depth, like looking into some other kind of world. Painting is a conversation, right? I wonder, who will this painting inspire next?