Artist, Joan Mitchell: My paintings repeat a feeling about water or fields. It’s more like a poem, you know?
Narrator: This is a painting by Joan Mitchell, who’s known for making abstract, layered paintings like this one. For her, painting was a way to express something that couldn’t be verbalized. She would often say that she wanted to “define a feeling” or convey her personal experience of a moment or place.
Joan Mitchell: I have a feeling or remembered feelings of nature, and I paint out of landscape, but I could never possibly copy that.
Narrator: The title of this painting refers to a neighborhood in Paris. But what we see isn’t a traditional landscape. Instead, it’s this dense cluster of color, some of it applied as thick brushstrokes and others as drips and splatters.
This painting was made between 1961 and 1962, which was a period of great change for Mitchell. In 1959, she moved permanently to France, where she had access to a bigger studio. Then, in 1960, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, which heightened the emotional turmoil the artist was already experiencing.
Joan Mitchell: My boldest paintings were in Paris. That period was a sort of great violent period. I was miserable and cold. I didn’t know anybody, and I didn’t speak French, and I was too shy, and I felt I didn’t understand anything.
Narrator: You can see her work starting to change; there's this sense of energetic, almost frenetic movement because she has more space to move and be messy. And then the paintings get more layered as her brushstrokes start to take on this three-dimensional texture. She's dealing with a lot of complicated feelings, and it's almost as if she's laying them bare onto the canvas.
Joan Mitchell: To make feeling out of painting, that's all I try to do.