Tilleul 1978

Joan Mitchell made "Tilleul," in Paris, using oils, and what strikes me is how the act of painting itself seems to be the subject. The surface is alive, right? Thick strokes of orange and blue build up the canvas, almost like she's wrestling with the scene. There's this area near the top, a flurry of cadmium hues, where the marks are so loaded, they almost become sculptural. You can practically feel the energy of her hand moving across the canvas. Mitchell reminds me a little of de Kooning, who was also interested in the materiality of paint. But where de Kooning felt like a brawl, Mitchell is more like a dance, a really wild, passionate dance with the canvas. In the end, it’s this tension between representation and abstraction that makes her paintings so compelling.