BARN BURD DESIGNS ~ BY KATHERINE T~ BEADS~JEWELRY~ART

 April Monthly Challenge

"Jacob’s Ladder", 1957

by Helen Frankenthaler

oil on canvas, 9' 5 3/8" x 69 7/8" (287.9 x 177.5 cm)

About the Art

The delicately colored Jacob's Ladder shows compositional echoes ranging back to Cubism and the early abstractions of Vasily Kandinsky, but as a young New York artist in the 1950s, Frankenthaler was most influenced by the Abstract Expressionists. Like Jackson Pollock, she explored working on canvases laid on the floor (rather than mounted on an easel or wall), a technique opening new possibilities in the handling of paint, and therefore in visual appearances. Letting paint fall onto canvas emphasized its physicality, and the physicality of the support too. Frankenthaler also admired the scale of Pollock's work, and she took from him, she said, her "concern with line, fluid line, calligraphy, and . . . experiments with line not as line but as shape."

Frankenthaler departed from Pollock's practice in the way she used areas of color and in her distinctive thinning of paint so that it soaked into her unprimed canvases. Because the image is so plainly embedded in the cloth, its presence as flat pigmented canvas tends to overrule any illusionistic reading of it—a priority in the painting of the time. Nor should the work's title suggest any preplanned illustrational intention. "The picture developed (bit by bit while I was working on it) into shapes symbolic of an exuberant figure and ladder," Frankenthaler said, "therefore Jacob's Ladder." MoMA, New York. Source

This month I am very excited about the painting I saw so many things that I can't stop my brain!

It has really helped me to enlarge the painting and pull out the images that I see. I do enjoy the movement and subtle layers it provides us. It reminds me of a garden.