Helen Frankenthaler, artist

Aleathia says:

I have been lucky enough in my travels to find an art museum to wander around and continue to be fascinated by the colors and movements swirling around in an artist's head.  I appreciate the depth and time it takes to create some of the master works in all of their glory and reality, but abstract art has always gripped me the most.  It is often the least understood and the hardest to explain. Most people like what is familiar and gravitate towards pieces that have a recognizable imagery. The wonderful thing about abstract art is each person gets to create their own interpreted story.  They can see what they want to see before understanding what the artist intended.

Helen Frankenthaler was born in New York City in 1928.  She was a notable American Abstract painter and helped to develop color field painting.  She exhibited work around the world starting in the 1950's until her death in 2011.  She continued to produce viable work her entire career.

Her main influences were Hans Hoffman, Jackson Pollock, and Clement Greenberg.  Frankenthaler's work is often identified "with the use of fluid shapes, abstract masses and lyrical gestures".  She has said "A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once."

The follow works of Helen Frankethaler are from the time span of 1952-1988. Her growth and color composition are most notable.

"It is an order familiar and new at the same time."--Helen Frankenthaler

1952 Mountains and Sea

This noted a big breakthrough in the style of painting with oils that looked like pastels and was then known as "stain painting".  Her work through the 1950's were similar in form containing evenly weighted compositions and stain painting.


1959 Mother Goose Melody

In this work the color palette is much darker and she invites the idea of a heavily, densely weighted side and an airy constructed side in the painting together.


1960-1962 Seascape with Dunes

This is a very centralized piece with a lot of raw canvas showing the stains of oil paints like ghost shadows.


1963-1968 Mauve District and Flood

These pieces were a large move towards acrylic paint which lent her to have a deeper sense of color within her chosen palette.  This move to acrylics saw less raw canvas and the paintings begin to feel more full and more abstract.


1970-1971  Sesame and Chairman of the Board

Frankenthaler continues the use of acrylics, but starts looking at her work with new formal consideration.

"Frankenthaler 'points to the four different compositional placements of the painting:its overall flatness, the play of the left side versus the right side, the interior of the white crossing passage--what she refers to as a cable or crevice'--and drawn lines, about whose space making she observes, 'I was very conscious of threading line through the cable/crevice'"


1972-1975 Hint from Bassano and Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Her work in this time is filled with wide swathes of color with the combination of levels both symmetrical and asymmetrical in context along with horizontal line movement.


1976-1977 Natural Answer and M.

After a trip to the Southwest, Frankenthaler came home with a new color palette which were mostly terra cotta shades. In this time period, the paintings were actually painted instead of stained.  With this there is a definite sense of structure and horizontal brush movement.


1978-1981  for E.M.

Paintings are becoming more rigid with themes and lines have a more interlocking look.  White starts to be a significant accent through them.


1981-1985 Reflections on a Blue Pool

Frankenthaler moves into a new period where the paint appears stained again with the addition of raised paint which adds texture and depth to the work.

1986-1988 Morpheus

She begins to move into implied grid like structures lending the work to have a more vertical movement and feeling.



I hope you enjoy these few selections from Helen Frankenthaler's collection.  Feel free to look her up as there is a vast amount of her work on the internet.

Art Bomb-9/19/2014 Sam Gilliam

Aleathia says:

It was my intention, as mentioned last week, to present artist's that burst into the scene in the 1980's and display their work from the beginning to the end of their careers.  This has not proved to be as easy as I would have hoped.  Not all artists have their own website which catalogs their life's work.  I do not have access to books on all of these artists either.  What I am left with is simple, good old-fashioned exposure.  You will have to live with it.

This week we are going to look at the work of Sam Gilliam who is an African-American painter born in 1933 in the great state of Mississippi.  He is a color field painter and a lyrical abstractionist.

Color Field painting is a type of abstract painting that emerged in NYC in the 1940's and 1950's and was inspired by European Modernism.  It is characterized by large flat fields of solid color that are spread across or stained into the canvas to create areas of unbroken surface.  The basis of this movement was more on the overall consistency of form and process.

Lyrical Abstraction emerged in the US in the 1960's and 1970's but originally began in Europe in the post war Modern painting era.  This movement in the US was rich in intuitive and loose paint handling, spontaneous expression, and illusionist space.  It went against the Formalist, Minimalist, Pop Art, and Geometric Abstractist painters.

"Dance me, Dance You 2"

"Carousel"

"The Keels"

Sam Gilliam did most of his work on stretched, wrapped, and draped canvases.  He was the first artist to introduce the idea of a painted canvas that was not stretched onto a frame base in 1965.

"Chehaw"

"Horse"

Gilliam also spent much of his career working on pieces that were sculptural or loaded with 3-D effects.  He often worked with many types of materials including: polypropylene, computer generated images, metallic and iridescent acrylics, handmade papers, aluminum, steel, plywood and plastic as well as traditional canvas.

"Tre"

"Pretty Boxes"

You can find Sam Gilliam's work as part of many museum collections especially in Washington DC and New York City.  I do hope you get some time to see his work in person.