Persian Garden 1966

Helen Frankenthaler made "Persian Garden" with lithography, pulling blocks of colour across the page. I can really imagine the process of making this print - the registration of the different colours, how the ink bleeds and spreads on the page. What's so cool here is how the colours interact and activate each other: the way that dark green bar at the top makes that hazy, golden rectangle below glow, or how the blue mark at the bottom holds down the whole composition. Maybe Frankenthaler was thinking about the play of light on water or foliage, or the scent of flowers hanging in the air. Frankenthaler and other painters in her circle really pushed printmaking in new directions. She’s in conversation with other artists, like Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, who were also inventing new languages for painting. Thinking through colour and form and feeling - and how we experience all of that stuff. It's not about answers, but about keeping the conversation going.