My sister is always putting the past behind
her—Well I use the past to make my pics
and I want all of it and even you and me in
candlelight on the train and every “lover” I’ve
ever had—every friend—nothing closed out—
and dogs alive and dead and people
and landscapes and feeling even if it is
desperate—anguished—tragic—it’s all part
of me and I want to confront it and sleep
with it—the dreams—and paint it.
JOAN MITCHELL
THIRTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD Joan Mitchell could nearly taste her love of oil paint. Working most afternoons and many nights, she abstained only when she felt too self-conscious, fell prey to depression, or wanted to intensify the feeling by resisting the urge to paint until it overwhelmed her. That her kitchen table and bed stood only steps away from her studio, the front half of an austere, turpentine-fragrant one-room apartment, attested to the centrality of painting in her life. Even when she wasn’t working, she might be envisioning a wedge of space or mulling over an idea like “that dark idea with the white.”
By early afternoon, this late riser would be padding around amid the gallon tins of turpentine, Medaglia D’Oro cans jammed with brushes, sheets of newspaper, smudged rags, battered tubes of oils, and half-filled ashtrays that littered her studio floor. From time to time she would pause to eyeball the charcoal and turpentine sketch on the primed linen, about eight by seven feet, stapled to her painting wall: the rudiments of her next picture.
Having dropped the needle on an LP and squeezed out her colors onto a sheet of plywood, Joan took her time mixing and thinning them in pie tins. Brushes too merited finicky consideration. Preferring them narrow, she rarely selected anything wider than her favorite beautifully worn one-inch flat hog-bristle. But she switched brushes often. (Work that evinced its maker’s cluelessness about the subtleties of brushes earned a sneering “Ugghrrr, there’s your typical one-brush painting!”)
All the while, Charlie Parker’s “Lover Man,” Bach’s Goldberg Variations, or Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in G Minor filled the room, making her “more available” to herself: conjuring colors and shapes, dissolving the hard edges of selfhood, and heightening her feelings about a certain grove, bridge, or waft of cloud from which she hoped to begin wresting a picture. Not that painting demanded only the amplification of memory and desire. It also required a delicate balance of surrender and will. She had to be scrupulously aware of what she was doing each time she let the paint fly. Line had to be discriminating, structure rigorous. Still, when she was really cranking, painting overleapt her conscious attention, and she skimmed along “no hands” like riding a bicycle. Or, better, she no longer existed.
Ready at last to address the canvas, Joan slid her brush into, say, a gleaming blue gray, and, all concentration, attacked with the precision of a fencer. Here her physical prowess came into play. She delivered slashing arm-long strokes, shot to her tiptoes, or wound up a sweep of her brush with a snap of the wrist and tiny explosion of paint. The rag in her left hand flew up to complete what the brush in her right had begun. She might effect a wisp of line by dry-brushing the canvas. Or plunge brush to canvas, the juiciest of pigments spitting from her bristles. Or (notwithstanding her misgivings about the drip, a cliché of Abstract Expressionism) allow thinned color to escape into dangling strings and jagged-tooth-comb shapes.
The brief skirmish ended after four or five strokes, Joan would retreat to the opposite end of her studio, twenty-three feet away, where she hunkered down, squinted, lit up a cigarette, sighted with her brush, and scrutinized what her marks were doing to each other. (Farsightedness accounted, in part, for her predilection for working big and looking from afar, but so did the challenge of heroic size set by male painters.) Minutes passed. Light from the trio of windows to her right raked the room. The record ended. A distant siren wailed. Footsteps sounded in the stairwell. Yet nothing hurried the peering and pondering essential to the self-demanding struggle painting required: “I ‘stop, look, and listen’ at railroad tracks. I really want to be accurate.”
For, as much as she reveled in the physicality of the attack, as vigorously as she plowed wet into wet, as eagerly as she seized upon the genuine accident, Joan was never a true action painter, never a subscriber to the notion that one finds a picture intuitively. Aiming to define a feeling, she proceeded from a mental image or images, adjusted, and readjusted, as her picture caught fire. Her method was additive; rarely did she scrape or redo. If a picture was working, she pushed ahead, more slowly as it evolved. If she became self-conscious about it, she knew she was bored and put down her brushes. If it took a serious turn for the worse, she junked it. Ah, but “how to come down from the clouds”?
“The painting has to work,” Joan believed, “but it has to say something more than that the painting works”—something exultant, tragic, raw. Something with the restraint and fire of Beethoven’s Appassionata op. 57. Or the bittersweet yearning of Billie Holiday’s “Autumn in New York,” with its “shimmering clouds in canyons of steel.” Something all the more transcendent for the artist’s hard-shell unsentimentality. “All vanitas,” a writer friend sums up Joan’s paintings, “and monstrous in their beauty.”