05 October, 2007

Helen Frankenthaler

Photo: Lieberman, Alexander

Here is a link to a new exhibition of one of my Abstract Expressionists, Helen Frankenthaler. It's at the Ameringer-Yohe Gallery currently.

Her school of art was known by some as Post Painterly Abstraction. Whatever. She painted in New York, she knew Jackson Pollock, she studied with Hans Hofmann, end of story. I will still place her in Abstract Expressionism, at least until I write my doctoral thesis on schools of art.

The following wisdom from Frankenthaler should be burned in your heart if you want to be an artist who paints well and freely:

"A really good picture looks as if it's happened at once. It's an immediate image. For my own work, when a picture looks labored and overworked, and you can read in it—well, she did this and then she did that, and then she did that—there is something in it that has not got to do with beautiful art to me. And I usually throw these out, though I think very often it takes ten of those over-labored efforts to produce one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronized with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute." (In Barbara Rose, Frankenthaler (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. 1975, p. 85)

I will not post any paintings of hers, since she still holds rights to them. Here is some link love about the master:

CONNECTED BY JOY, 1967-70, via the Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle.
Wikipedia entry on HF.
Googleography (my own word for a list of books on Google).
What amounts to a resume on HF at World Wide Art Resources.
Bio from the NGA.

4 comments:

vivien said...

she had an influence on my work in the way I often use thinned acrylics on unprimed canvas to start with - and a lot of this remains in the final painting.

It allows me to combine watercolour effects ( which are then sealed) with more opaque oil paint techniques and then glazing in oils to build the image :)

Casey Klahn said...

Thanks, Vivien. I certainly find her work inspiring.

Mary Richmond said...

ah yes, one of my most very favorite artists. There was a wonderful show of her work in Boston a few years ago and I had to keep going back....to dream and drool and sigh...

Casey Klahn said...

Thanks for the read & comment, Mary.

Abstract Expressionism, Art Criticism, Artists, Colorist Art, Drawing, History, Impressionism, Modern Art, Painting, Pastel, Post Impressionism