Land 1989

Joan Mitchell made this diptych, called "Land," with oil on two joined canvases, and just look at the sweep of it! You can feel the artist in the act of painting, making decision after decision, shifting and adjusting, almost like a dance. I imagine Mitchell, brush loaded, stepping back and lunging forward, again and again. She’s building a world in layers of blues and greens, punctuated with these stabbing reds. The paint isn’t too thick, but it’s laid on with conviction, each stroke carrying feeling. See how those blue strokes at the top feel like the sky pressing down? It's so physical, like she’s wrestling with the canvas. I see Mitchell’s paintings as part of a larger conversation among painters, like Helen Frankenthaler and others. They’re all pushing at the edges of what painting can do. Painting, for Mitchell, wasn’t about answers but about possibilities, a kind of embodied thinking. It’s this openness that makes her work so alive and relevant today.