Two shows in Charlottesville inspired by “lady painter” Joan Mitchell.
Isabelle Abbot’s “Passing” is a masterful evocation of atmospheric conditions. By a deft application of whites and grays, Abbot recreates the effect of sun glinting off surfaces, capturing the weak light that filters through mist. That mist turns the mountains a vague lavender and the sky a creamy white. Oil on canvas, 45” by 50”, 2019.
A painter’s painter and one of the most dazzling artists of the 20th century, Joan Mitchell (1925-1992) is referred to as a “second generation” abstract expressionist. The term doesn’t do justice to her remarkable achievements. Mitchell created a visual language all her own and infiltrated what was then the male-dominated art world, demonstrating with substance and style that she could paint with the best of them.
Landscape was Mitchell’s primary influence. She embraced abstraction because it allowed her to paint her emotional reaction to what she saw, rendering it with an extraordinary eye for color and a physicality expressed through impassioned gesture. Mitchell had profound synesthesia and was hardwired to perceive sensory phenomena simultaneously. So, when she read something, it would provoke a visual response and vice versa.
Mitchell referred to herself as a “lady painter.” It was an homage to her mother, a poet of some note who was called a “lady poet.” Mitchell, too, had an affinity for poetry and referred to her work as image poems. The title was also an ironic jab she used to acknowledge the segregated status she endured. Mitchell’s ambition was to dissolve gender lines and work and exhibit alongside the male painters of her generation.
In “Tapis Bleu,” Molly Herman uses layers of paint, encaustic, collage, and a variety of interesting marks to impart depth and zest. Charged with energy, the work is a perfectly calibrated tightrope walk between chaos and control. Oil and encaustic on burlap, 18” by 24”, 2015.
Two shows in Charlottesville—Lady Painters: Inspired by Joan Mitchell at the nonprofit contemporary art space Second Street Gallery and Landscape Re-Imagined at Les Yeux du Monde—feature artists whose work draws inspiration from Mitchell: Isabelle Abbot (Greenwood), Karen Blair (Crozet), Janet Bruce (Brookneal), Mary Page Evans (Wilmington, Delaware), Molly Herman (Brooklyn, New York), and Priscilla Whitlock (Charlottesville). Despite living out of state, Evans and Herman are both native Virginians who return frequently to paint the landscape of their birth.
The genesis for the Lady Painters show, which runs June 7 to July 19, came from Second Street Gallery director Kristen Chiacchia. She had developed a keen appreciation for Joan Mitchell while working at the New York gallery Edward Tyler Nahem, which dealt in Mitchell’s work. Following her move to Charlottesville in 2016, Chiacchia began frequenting Les Yeux du Monde, where she discovered Abbot, Blair, Bruce, and Whitlock’s work. “I saw the connection right away to Joan Mitchell,” she says. “I began thinking about doing a group show with these women, looking at how Mitchell has influenced their careers and how they’ve been thinking about her.”
Describing the Landscape Re-Imagined exhibition, which runs June 8 through Aug. 11, Les Yeux du Monde director Lyn Warren says, “It shows how artists continue to draw on the work of influential leaders in the field, learning from them and reinterpreting their oeuvre to come up with a body of work all their own. Collaborating with Second Street Gallery has enabled us both to provide an expanded experience for the viewer.”
Joan Mitchell’s influence looms large in the work on display at both venues. Her gesture, color sense, conceptual approach, are all there, reinterpreted and individualized. The passion and integrity are also there, and those are the greatest lessons she has passed down to this generation of “lady painters.” SecondStreetGallery.org; LYDM.co
This article originally appeared in our June 2019 issue.
