Check out Blood-On-The-Walls for more posts like this. (Does not take credit for photo.)
Joan Mitchell, Rock Bottom, 1960-61
From the Blanton Museum of Art:
The most prominent group of Abstract Expressionists-Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Hans Hofmann-distilled the problems of abstraction into a set of more or less clear questions to be addressed by succeeding generations. Departing from those artists’ purely abstract precedents, Joan Mitchell and others explored the atmospheric effects of light and color in gestural painting, developing an understanding of pictorial space rooted in observations of the natural world. Rather than creating an overall flat field of roughly equivalent marks, shapes, and gestures, Mitchell located her loose and thickly brushed central image in an implied field of white, establishing figure against background, shape against space. In Rock Bottom, a superb example of her work, landscape allusions abound. Though Mitchell once called it “a very violent painting,” perhaps referring to its turbulent brushwork and the abrupt dissolution of forms into drips and splatters at the painting’s edges, the work is harmonious, its compositional, color, and surface variations held in perfect balance.
