one of my favourite expereinces with art ever, was seeing a mid 60s crown point seires of prints, done by helen frankenthaler, kneeling on the floor, infront of this portfolio, hung together with string, white linen gloves on, in the basement of an office tower, in vancouver, about 3 years ago, spending an hour looking thru these 10 images, tight, goregous, ehteral, complicated, and new images--images made by staining and moving, by the implication of pigment, away from brush into something more elemental--they looked arieal, shots from an airplane, of dileuvian fields, odd deltas, or more abstract places, they had the cartography of natures chaos--and the colours, no one was a colourist like frankenthaler--they were impossible to describe, a pink somewhere b/w shrimp and flamingo, a green like the shade of a rubber tree plant, a turqoiuse that kind of looked like swimming pool water done by hockney or navaho jewellery...

in the rise of 2nd generation abexers, and of women esp. (in terms of market and respect) i had two mysteries---why the hell wasnt robert motherwells collage peices getting more love, and where in gods name was frankenthaler (shes still alive, still making art--

the problem with good ol google image search, is that the colours are radically different, and so its difficult to talk about them, and with the watercolour effects here its even more difficult--and this was designed as a poster for lincoln center too, so that also makes these things problematic--anyways this image:

Flirt, 1995, is amazing, and since it sold for 10k at sothebys this week, her star may be rising (after lee krasner, joan mitchell and morris louis)

form and joy arent popular these days--but the lightness, the airness, the flirtatious glee that permeates this--the ease and the decades spent aquiring that ease are all here--that red stain that bifurcates the orange and pink forms, meandering to the blue edge, like a wine stain or lipstick; the two green rectangles beside all of that pink, to avoid cute, the blue itself, a wide and open colour, edging to the ends, past the ends of the paper, like some kind of watery frontier, the tiny touch of yellow in the far left, anthologzing all the other colours in the peice, the moulting circles of pink on pink at the center, like flamingo feathers...


frankenthaler is deeply over looked--and i think it is because she is so pretty, so decrotative, so lovely, and uncomplicated and joyus and pure...and shes still working towards something...