Playa 1950

Helen Frankenthaler made ‘Playa’ with oil paint in no particular year. The whole surface of the painting has a kind of golden, sandy light, almost like memory itself. It has these looping, child-like shapes with raw dark outlines, like when you are a kid and you try to define an image with a thick marker pen. I can imagine Helen hovering over this canvas, maybe on the floor, maybe on the wall, trying to fix her images, and then letting them all become unfixed again. There's something really courageous about making work this direct. She wasn’t trying to show off, she just wanted to find out what it felt like to be a painter in that moment. I think about her pouring paint directly onto the canvas, her ‘soak stain’ technique, which was such a big deal. With the red marks here and there, it reminds me a little of Joan Mitchell, too. It’s like, we’re all in this together.