Bedford II 1981

Joan Mitchell made this work, Bedford II, with lithographic crayon on paper. Imagine Mitchell making marks, layer upon layer, shifting and emerging through intuition to create this dense field of colour! The paper vibrates with deep blues and purples, punctuated by softer pinks and a bright fringe of green at the top. I sympathize with her. What was she thinking when she made it? Maybe she felt like she was making a garden of colour, an abstract space where forms emerge and dissolve. There’s a real physicality to these marks – a feeling of her hand moving across the paper, building up a surface that’s both delicate and powerful. That gesture, that mark-making, communicates so much feeling. Mitchell had such a strong voice, but she was also in conversation with other painters like de Kooning and Kline. Artists are always riffing off each other, you know? They inspire each other, challenge each other. Painting is this ongoing exchange of ideas, a conversation across time. There’s no one way to read a painting like this. It’s ambiguous and uncertain, and that’s what makes it so exciting!