My first deeply transformative art experience was inspired by mostly green and black swipes zipping across an icy field. Sometimes the ice exploded. Sometimes the greens and blacks did.
It was 1966 or ’67. While I was sitting on the floor below a painting, a gallery guard walked by and said something like, “Kid, these floors are for standing. Not sitting.” So I stood up. When he moved on, I sat down again.
I sat down partly to avoid falling down. Due to its dizzying to-and-fro-ing, the painting created in me a rush that teetered on vertigo. It was the first time I understood viscerally that a picture did not need resemblance—an “aha” that likely occurred on the spot. What did not occur right then was that you can take in a painting with your whole body; that you can get floored by colored marks and out of breath while sitting still; that paint can be weather, music, joy, combat, grace.
Moved by its calligraphic thrusts, I saw Hemlock’s (1956) layered figure and ground weaves—roller coaster rhythms of wintry viridian. When I saw the verdant hue breathing harder in its workout as foliage, the image looked less vertiginous, but no less moving.
How long was it before I noticed the painting’s title, Hemlock? If I had read it first, I likely would have seen the painting less abstractly. I don’t remember if I recognized the artist’s name, but since then, “Joan Mitchell” has been part of me, like letters carved into a tree.
Hemlock is presently on display in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s blockbuster exhibit, Joan Mitchell. Katy Siegel, from the BMA, along with Sarah Roberts, from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, co-curated this dazzling retrospective. They also co-edited its beautifully illustrated catalogue (a tome, really) and contributed insightful essays to the text that range from scholarly to anecdotal.
There are blues, reds, and ochres that I don’t remotely recall. Paintings we return to inevitably change, because we change. But Hemlock’s leafy branches are still leafy—after all, its namesake is an evergreen.
However, despite seeing countless paintings for the last half-century inspired by Mitchell and her fellow Abstract Expressionists like Grace Hartigan, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, for me Hemlock has retained its tangle of visual thrills. Some shocks are timeless. So is great art.
But people aren’t. Mitchell died at the relatively young age of sixty-seven. Remarkably, during her waning years while she was struggling with lung cancer, arthritis, and a second hip replacement, she seemed to attack her canvases with the same zest that had earned this Chicago-born-and-raised youth the handle “Figure Skating Queen of the Midwest.” Asked how she dealt with her decidedly strenuous painting approach while ailing, the painter replied, “I just got up on that fucking ladder and told myself, ‘This stroke has to work.’”