Beclouded Person 1955

"Beclouded Person" by Joan Miró is a riot of shapes and colors, probably made with lithography or some other print process. Look at the way he's just letting the shapes do their thing, floating around, bumping into each other. It's all about the process, you know? The colors! Primary, but with a twist. That teal against the yellow… whew! And the black lines are so confident, so sure of themselves. It reminds me of drawing with a fat marker, just letting the ink flow. There is a face right at the top, but it’s also not really a face, you know? Two big circles for eyes, a funny little nose, and that grid of black dots all around it. Is it a mask? Is it a ghost? It's all a bit dreamlike. Miró always felt like a kindred spirit. Like he was just playing, and that's how the best art gets made, isn't it? I think about the work of Elizabeth Murray when looking at this, another artist with this type of playful abstraction.