Joan Mitchell, They Never Appeared in the White, 1973
"What makes me want to squeeze the paint in the first place, so that the brush is out, is a memory of a feeling. It might be of a dead dog, it might be of a lake, but once I start painting, I'm painting a picture" (J. Mitchell, quoted in J. E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell, exh. cat., New York, 1988, p. 33).
After her move to the countryside of rural Vétheuil, which is north of Paris, on an expansive property Mitchell seemed to inspire a more lyrical approach to abstraction. Many of her paintings embody her felt responses to nature and landscapes. Emotional and expressive strokes of colors personify her style of painting. The later pictures are open and airy, often exploding in colorful calligraphic gestures. Mitchell was known to talk about how her paintings are conceived from her memories from nature or in her words ‘what it leaves me with’. Her work oftentimes emulates the movement, gravity, and structure of landscapes in nature.
The Joan Mitchell painting, titled ’They Never Appeared with the White”, a diptych oil on canvas painted in 1973 is one of her larger scaled works painted when she was living in France. The piece consists of two canvases each 94 ½ x70 1/2 in. which when placed together dominates 141 ½ inches of wall space. Like many other post-War American painters, Mitchell was utilizing sheer physical size to vocalize her visual statement. On the grounds of the two large canvases that are butted together is a treatment of layered patches of white that seems to have been each dirtied by blue, grey and taupe pigments. The whites present the canvases as large rectangular blocks that may be read as the ground or as part of the paintings landscape. In bottom right hand corner of each layered and seemingly dingy white panel lays a light lavender blue “nest” form. Beside each of these circular nest figures is a deep indigo patch that drips paint to the bottom edge of the canvas. On the right canvas another small emerald patch has been wedged in between the indigo blue patch and the lavender blue nest, which has tufted a slight tangle of flame colored brush strokes. It seems to be crowding the blue patch, which elongates it slightly. Most dramatically in the right hand panel Mitchell applies three massive vertical strokes of color, salmon pink, more lavender blue and the largest a deep emerald green. The dominating three swaths of color in the right hand panel might read as a surprise or conclusion in relation to the left hand panel. When reading the diptych from left to right, which comes so naturally to the viewer, there is an emotional build up, a crescendo of the right hand panel. This effect makes this particular painting stand out from Joan Mitchell’s larger body of work with its open spaces and visual imbalance.
