Untitled c. 1960

This is an Untitled print by Joan Mitchell, and right away, you can see it's all about gesture and color, a dance of intuition, where the making is right there on the surface. Mitchell lays down these strokes in blues and blacks, scraping and dragging the ink. It feels physical, like she’s wrestling with the image, trying to get something out. Look closely, and you can see how the ink varies from thick opaque scrawls to watery, translucent layers. The white of the paper peeks through, creating this sense of light and air, which also creates a tension. My eye is drawn to that inky swipe in the upper corner, it anchors the whole composition. It’s like a punctuation mark, or a door. Mitchell reminds me of Cy Twombly, both digging into the possibilities of abstraction. But where Twombly feels romantic, Mitchell is raw and immediate. Neither tells you what to think, they just invite you to look and feel.