Using a moody palette could at first seem to be limiting in some ways. But like everything, the deeper you look, the more you find.
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AP®︎/College Art History
Course: AP®︎/College Art History > Unit 6
Lesson 2: Modern and contemporary art
Courbet, The Stonebreakers
Early Photography: Niépce, Talbot and Muybridge
Manet, Olympia
Painting modern life: Monet’s Gare Saint-Lazare
Monet, The Gare Saint-Lazare
Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
Rodin, The Burghers of Calais
Velasco, The Valley of Mexico
Van Gogh, The Starry Night
Van Gogh, The Starry Night
Mary Cassatt, The Coiffure
Munch, The Scream
Gauguin, Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
Sullivan, Carson, Pirie, Scott Building
Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire
Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
The first modern photograph? Alfred Stieglitz, The Steerage
Stieglitz, The Steerage
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss
Constantin Brancusi, The Kiss
Analytic Cubism
Matisse, Goldfish
Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (second version), 1912
Kirchner, Self-Portrait As a Soldier
Käthe Kollwitz, In Memoriam Karl Liebknecht
Le Corbusier, Villa Savoye
Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow
Stepanova, The Results of the First Five-Year Plan
Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
Meret Oppenheim, Object (Fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon)
Frank Lloyd Wright, Fallingwater
Kahlo, The Two Fridas (Las dos Fridas)
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*short version*)
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series (*long version*)
Duchamp, Fountain
Lam, The Jungle
Mexican Muralism: Los Tres Grandes David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and José Clemente Orozco
Rivera, Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Central Park
de Kooning, Woman I
Mies van der Rohe, Seagram Building
Warhol, Marilyn Diptych
Yayoi Kusama, Narcissus Garden
Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay
Claes Oldenburg, Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks
Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty
Robert Venturi, House in New Castle County, Delaware
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Horn Players
© 2023 Khan Academy
By Dr. Farisa Khalid
Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 204.2 x 208.6 x 2.2 cm (Detroit Institute of Arts; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 204.2 x 208.6 x 2.2 cm (Detroit Institute of Arts; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler
At first glance, it’s hard to know what to make of Helen Frankenthaler’s heaving, atmospheric painting, The Bay.
The top of the canvas (detail), Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 204.2 x 208.6 x 2.2 cm (Detroit Institute of Arts; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler
The top of the canvas (detail), Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 204.2 x 208.6 x 2.2 cm (Detroit Institute of Arts; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler
We see an imposing fluid blue promontory suspended in front of us. Its colors ranging from violet to indigo run into one another with a clear zone of navy near the top of the canvas that draw our eyes up to it. The blurring of the colors gives an immediate sense of the artist’s process: paint poured onto the canvas when it was wet. We can almost watch as the blues meld into one another during this early stage giving the image its blurred and smooth finish.
Detail, Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 204.2 x 208.6 x 2.2 cm (Detroit Institute of Arts; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler
Detail, Helen Frankenthaler, The Bay, 1963, acrylic on canvas, 204.2 x 208.6 x 2.2 cm (Detroit Institute of Arts; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler
Is its subject what the title suggests—a landform of some kind with certain emblematic associations? Is the swelling amorphous blue mass floating amid that moss green and cream border meant to stand for something beyond itself? With many Abstract Expressionist paintings of the 1950s and 60s, it’s important not to get too caught up with possible social and historical contexts and biography, but to focus on what’s before us—the physical elements of the work itself because those elements can tell us so much about the painting.
When Helen Frankenthaler painted The Bay, she was already a well-regarded artist. She’d been the subject of a LIFE Magazine profile in 1956 and was one of the handful of women among the traditional all-boys’ club of the New York Abstract Expressionists. The Bay was chosen as one of the paintings for the American pavilion of the 1966 Venice Biennale. Looking closely you can see that the shades of blues that run into one another are part of a specific process of pouring paint on to the canvas rather than painting the colors onto the surface with a brush, as the leading Abstract Expressionist painters, like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, were so famous for doing.
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, charcoal and oil on canvas, 220 x 297.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washingon, D.C.; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler
Helen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, 1952, charcoal and oil on canvas, 220 x 297.8 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washingon, D.C.; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) © Estate of Helen Frankenthaler
Soak-stain
Frankenthaler’s approach here was to use a soak-stain method with diluted acrylic paint. Acrylics gave her more flexibility with viscosity and movement than oils, and allowed her more control as she poured that thinned paint onto the taut unprimed canvas so that it would get absorbed into the weave of the fabric. As a substitute for the action of the brush, Frankenthaler would lift the canvas and tilt it at various angles so that the paint would flow across the surface. She had to account for gravity and the ebb and flow of a liquid across a flat surface, so a fascinating aspect of Frankenthaler’s method is the blend of the artist’s control paired with the unpredictability of the forces of nature.
This kind of painting is often classified as Color Field painting, painting characterized by simplicity of line and a focus on color as the subject rather than as an add-on. The first generation of Abstract Expressionists, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman were the first important Color Field painters, while Helen Frankenthaler is often classified as a second-generation member of the group.
Frankenthaler was inspired by the drip method of Jackson Pollock who began painting on the floor in the late 1940s, but she knew she wanted to work differently. Pollock and other artists such as de Kooning and Franz Kline had made the painted gesture too famous and recognizable by the early 1950s. In 1952, at the age of 23, Frankenthaler’s experiments lead her to produce her first major painting, Mountains and Sea, an expansive luminous depiction of the landscape of Nova Scotia, where she’d recently taken a holiday.
Painting a Storm – An Exercise
Let’s see what happens if we start with the same scene, yet change our brushstrokes slightly to create two completely different moods.
Let’s start with the two canvases with the same background. I’ve used Dioxazine Purple, Cadmium Yellow Medium, Pthalo Blue and Carbon Black in the Atelier Free Flow range to paint the background stormy sky and water.
Background – stormycanvas 1
Blocking in – Canvas 1 and 2:
I used a mix of Burnt Umber and Pthalo Blue to block in the foreground rocks. I added Forest Green to this colour and blocked in the foreground trees as well. I added sky colour (in this case a loose mix of black and white) to block in the background trees and rocks.
Painting a storm – stormy scene – blocking in
Canvas 1: Stormy, windy scene shown through the bend in the trees and whitecaps. Subtle brushwork to create ultra mood.
Canvas 2: The calm before the storm – reflective water and upright trees convey that sense of smooth, calm unease you feel before a storm hits.
For the finishing touches on this exercise, the whites have been tinted with a little bit of the grey to subdue it a little. For Canvas 1, the brushtrokes were shorter and applied with more vigour, and drawn out and more softly applied in Canvas 2
Sea & Sky in Acrylics Book with Dave White.
The sea is a fickle beast. It can be calm or rough, almost still or in violent movement, often all in the same day. Try to pin it down in a painting and the chances are it’ll be doing something else before you’ve finished. Add to that the complications of portraying movement in a still image and you may conclude that the whole thing is too hard.
And yet, we’re constantly drawn to it. It’s that very variety that attracts. It’s never the same subject twice and the challenges are simply exhilarating.
In this marvellously progressive course, Dave White will help you on the journey towards work you can be proud of. He’ll explain the difference between a rising and a falling wave and how the direction of the wind affects movement, as well as how to capture reflections effectively.
When it comes to the sky, he tackles the all-important step of selecting a vanishing point, how to give your clouds body and how to handle a wide variety of lighting conditions, including sunsets.
The book concludes with a series of projects that put well-explained theory into practice and will develop your skills to the maximum.
Book: Search Press . Paperback . 128 pages . Colour throughout.
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Artist Dave White
Brand Search Press
Format Book
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