Trees I

A leading American painter and printmaker, Joan Mitchell was a contemporary of Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell among the artists of the so-called second generation of the Abstract Expressionists. She is widely regarded as one of the supreme colorists of that movement. Her lyrical abstractions are generally inspired by actual entities found in nature, such as fields, wooded landscapes, or studies of flowers. Commenting on Mitchell's work, art critic E.C. Goossen noted, The Abstract Expressionist generation out of which she came was forever searching for abstract subject matter with transcendent implications, even though it professed to believe that art was its own message... But unlike those contemporary painters who 'discover' their subject in the process of painting, Mitchell works from an idea and builds on it.