Solar Imp 2001

Helen Frankenthaler made Solar Imp with paint. It's yellow, orange, black, white, red, green, and blue. A flurry of colours and gestural marks. I imagine Frankenthaler in her studio, lost in the act of painting. She was a real innovator, you know? This piece reminds me a bit of her soak-stain paintings, where she poured thinned paint directly onto raw canvas, letting the colours seep into the fabric. You can see a similar effect here with the way the yellow and orange seem to bleed into the white ground. The shapes are so suggestive. The black blots at the top look like two figures, maybe birds, perched precariously. And the bright yellow circle at the bottom, could that be the sun? Frankenthaler was so good at creating these open, ambiguous spaces where anything feels possible. She's in dialogue with her peers, like Morris Louis or Kenneth Noland, but she's really pushing the boundaries of what painting could be.