Helen Frankenthaler her work lives on!

Chapman Blog

I follow Chapman Interiors- Blog, and loved the room most recently posted. It has a wall mural in a dining room that was beautiful, and yet acted as its own separate piece of art. I felt as if I had seen work like that before, however, never in mural form! Cufhome designed the interiors of that room, and although the muralist was not listed I felt compelled to search for an artist that represented  that style of abstract landscape. My sister and partner Suzanne clued me in to Helen Frankenthaler! I had remembered seeing her work years ago, and now looking at them again I see that airy quality that Cufhome had  their muralist render in that amazing room! 

Unfortunately, we lost this great artist in December, 2011 at the age of 83. She was one of the best of the second generation of abstract painters in the United States, with a deeply personal vision that reconciled abstraction with the lighter, finer and more poetic emotions. Helen’s work was profoundly untroubled, lyrical and truly beautiful. A regular summer resident of the artist colony at Provincetown, she was known for creating abstract works using thin washes of translucent colored paint that soaked into her unprimed canvases, achieving qualities similar to watercolor - though often on a grand scale. Frankenthaler had a powerful impact on the painters who would later be known as the Washington Color School. By pouring paint thinned with turpentine directly onto unprimed canvass, she created large swatches of color that felt as permeable and liquid as the background in a watercolor. This method of painting is best known as Color Field. There was something airy and spiritual about the best of Helen Frankenthaler’s work, perhaps because her paintings often seemed to float ecstatically just under the surface on which they were painted. Besides her paintings, Ms. Frankenthaler is also known for her lithographs, etchings and screen prints, but critics feel that her woodcuts have made the most original contribution to printmaking.(Information obtained from the Washington Post)

 I love Helen Frankenthalers work, it is not tragic or dramatic, or appears to the work of a troubled soul, instead it provokes a feeling of peacefulness when studying  each piece.

We lost a great artist, but through art books, and museums we are still fortunate enough to have access to such brilliant works of art!