Beginnings 2002

This is Frankenthaler's "Beginnings," and what a title, right? You can see it's made with washes of color, like watercolor, but it's oil paint, staining the canvas. I love the way that big cadmium-red shape is bleeding out towards the corner, like a memory. You get the sense Frankenthaler is reaching for something, maybe just beyond her grasp. There's a push-and-pull here, that's kind of jazzy: the way she puts down a color, maybe wipes it away, lets it sit, and moves onto the next one. Her works feel like a constant searching, which I think is a big part of what makes her so great. You see her method, but you also see a kind of soul-searching. Her process was always about experimenting, pushing the boundaries, very much in conversation with other painters like Pollock and Rothko. You could say that making paintings is a kind of starting over, again and again.