MUSE
Helen Frankenthaler
An exhibition last year at The Tate Modern of Helen Frankenthaler, reminded me how much I admire her work, her instinctive use of colour is sublime, she was a dynamic abstract expressionist. She is one of a few female artists to have achieved success and recognition in her own lifetime.
I am especially drawn to her print-making where I feel she creates a shared relationship between herself and the viewer; a meaningful interaction, like an open conversation between the two of us.
As someone who lives and breathes colour, I am awe struck by her print-making processes. Somehow the layers of ink once overlaid produce unexpected revelations of colour. Colours on colours.
It reminds me of when I worked with experienced fabric dyers in Jaipur, with endless buckets full of colour moving fabric from one to the next. It can produce the most thrilling and unexpected results-but only if you have their intuition and experience.
- Heti Gervis
Helen Frankenthaler in her studio “in the woods” in Provincetown, 1968. Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Alexander Liberman Photography Archive; Getty Research Institute.
There are some names you are familiar with from an early age; perhaps these include Picasso, Miro, Kahlo, Van Gogh, and then there are some artists that you learn about in your adulthood, through your own volition and that speak to you, seemingly with perfect timing of discovery. Frakenthaler is that artist for me.
I remember noting her name, perhaps 5 years ago, through a Pinterest rabbit-hole, and it turns out I had been eyeing and saving her artwork to our colour boards for years without registering the artist.
With a career that spans over 50 years, Frankenthaler captures my attention and imagination with her use of colour, shape work/abstractism, and scale. I am happily lost in her scope of work, and the evolution of her artistry through medium, and throughout new art movements.
- Chloë Browne-Beck
Canal, 1963. Helen Frankenthaler. Guggenheim
For further learning, our research took us to the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, the Guggenheim Collection with dates and detail of her career, a NY Times ‘Abstract Climates’ article on Frakenthaler’s ode to Provincetown (exhibition write-up), or visually feast on her work on our Heti’s Colours MUSE Board or Gagosian Gallery collection.
We have chosen the Alexi scarf to sit with our Muse, the simple colour palette with subtle nuances seems to embody her play with colour - not the contrasting / bold palette you may have expected but in keeping with her beliefs that art rules are limiting, and there is no right or wrong way to play and experiment with colour. Frankenthaler inherently believed this, and it holds true for us.
