Blue Territory 1972

Joan Mitchell’s "Blue Territory" is a gorgeous landscape of feeling, all realized in oil on canvas. I bet that blue patch up top was the first mark made, that deep cobalt a starting point from which everything else evolved. I can almost feel Mitchell's arm moving, layering strokes of greens and reds and yellows, figuring out her personal geography, one gesture at a time. There's so much layering and scraping back, as if she’s trying to find the right combination of hues and densities. See how the paint drips like rain, pulling our eye downward? It makes me think of Helen Frankenthaler and the way she stained the canvas, but Mitchell is rougher, tougher, more physical somehow. This feels like a place I want to be in, a place where color and form collide and coexist. So much of painting is a conversation, a back-and-forth across time, and Mitchell knew this better than anyone.