Materials and Practice

Though Mitchell discontinued the practice of sketching out compositions, she expanded her development of complex compositional structures as she moved toward abstraction. Paintings such as Coney Island, from 1950, were the last to maintain visible references to figures and landscapes. Over the course of that year, she dissolved such concrete imagery entirely in favor of the pulsing constellations of line, shape, and color that characterize her first fully abstract works.

In Untitled, ca. 1950, Mitchell combined a wide array of thick and thin lines with abstract shapes, using both flat and more textured brushwork. All these elements are fitted together like pieces of a puzzle, with occasional small sections of canvas left unpainted. Mitchell also painted white on top of other colors, visually echoing the areas of unpainted canvas and further complicating the sense of space and movement within a painting—a practice she maintained across her lifetime.

From roughly 1952 to 1967, many of Mitchell’s canvases began with her intuitively sketching out an initial, open armature of thin arching and angled lines, usually in a deep shade of blue, brown, or gray. These first touches occasionally remain visible in the outer corners of a canvas, as seen in Harbor December, 1956, and Cercando un ago, 1959. She then added layers cumulatively and intentionally, with each mark responding and carefully contributing to the developing composition. She rarely scraped paint off, preferring to build on each prior choice to make it work. Although the end results can appear quite spontaneous, as though paint were applied in one quick session, in fact, each painting took days, weeks, or even months to create and every decision resulted from deliberation and her deep understanding of her materials and craft.

A group of works published as “The Fields” in the catalogue for Mitchell’s 1972 exhibition My Five Years in the Country, is characterized by patchworks of irregular rectangles and loose strokes of contrasting colors. In paintings such as Bonjour Julie, 1971, areas of bare canvas abut sections of dry, scumbled dabs, passages of barely visible, thin washes, running drips, and robust, textured impasto.

Mitchell’s distinctive use of multiple, joined canvases to create a large-scale, horizontal work began in earnest in the 1960s, and she continued investigating this approach through the end of her life. Mitchell stated that she liked the multipanel format for practical reasons—it allowed her to construct much larger finished works from smaller, easier to handle units— and because she liked the visual effect of the vertical line separating the panels. In some instances, panels act as variations on a motif, as in the two panels of South, 1989; while others introduce a back-and-forth dialogue, much like pages of a book, as in La Grande Vallée IX, 1989. Some, including Salut Tom, 1979, suggest a panorama or enveloping environment, or even, as in La Vie en rose, a series of thoughts or narrative progression across the surface of the work. She also created much smaller scaled single and multipanel works, moving fluidly and effectively from the intimate to the monumental. In all the multipanel works, Mitchell masterfully connects the segments through her orchestration of color choices, the thickness and translucency of her paint, and the proportionate use and placement of different hues, creating movement, light, and space across the full expanse of every work.