“My pictures are full of climates - abstract climates and not nature per se, but a feeling - of an order that is associated more with nature… Nature in order - order out of chaos. Nature is always fighting that battle.”
E xecuted in 1968, Helen Frankenthaler's Yellow Canyon is a triumphant example of the artist’s mastery of color. Canary yellows modulated with shades of honey marigold pool within an expanse of rippling sapphire. The artist’s particular approach to abstraction, first employed in 1952 in her groundbreaking painting, Mountains and Sea, was achieved by diluting her paint and allowing it to completely soak into the fibers of the raw, unprimed canvas. Whereas in the 1952 painting, Frankenthaler gently guided the pigment across the surface in controlled passages, here she pours vast expanses of color across the canvas, generating rhythm and dynamic movement. The thinned paint fuses with its fibrous support, drawing attention to the canvas as an integral part of the art itself and representing an abrupt departure from the materiality of paint which was central to the work of the Abstract Expressionists. With this innovative process, Frankenthaler was able to render color in an entirely novel way. In Yellow Canyon, each undulating passage is composed of numerous washes of thinned paint, the effect of which is revealed in the subtle variations between areas of puddling and modulating color, creating an illusionistic depth and sense of place.
By the mid-1960s, Frankenthaler had begun to refine her painting technique and commit herself to innovation and experimentation in the studio. In 1966 the artist’s influence as a leading figure within the 1960s Color Field and larger Abstract Expressionist movement was cemented by her selection as one of four artists to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Both an insistence upon the physicality of the surface of the painting and an emphatically all-over composition tie Frankenthaler inextricably to her predecessors and peers Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Barnett Newman, all of whom pushed the boundaries of their paintings both literally and figuratively. John Elderfield writes: “No longer are corners and edges ignored. But since image and painting surface are coextensive now – unrolling horizontally out from the center – the corners and edges are less boundaries than before. They had previously been neutralized by being ignored. Now, they are expanded. As with Newman, especially, the pictorial space seems to resonate even beyond the limits of its physical support.” (John Elderfield, Frankenthaler, 1987, pp. 87-88)
“One has the feeling that her pictures are an environment into which we look, and in a similar way, that it is an environment, a place, where she has been.”
Frankenthaler was compelled by her surroundings, particularly the natural environment. While her paintings never depict her environment through discrete figuration or referential iconography, they nevertheless have the unique ability to convey one’s experience within it. In Yellow Canyon, Frankenthaler invites the viewer to lose themselves in the vertiginous peaks of rich yellow and tantalizing blue, an abstract realm brimming with life. The saturated and intense hues seem to refract with prismatic light whose energy emanates through the zones of contrasting color and surges beyond the confines of the canvas.
