Cool Summer
Helen Frankenthaler
HELEN FRANKENTHALER, 1962. OIL ON CANVAS.
Helen Frankenthaler works in collaboration with her materials. Part of the second wave of Post-War American Abstract painters, Frankenthaler split from her contemporaries and almost single handedly ushered in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color-Field painting. She created a technique called ‘soak-staining’, thinning down oil paint to the consistency of watercolour and letting the textures of the raw canvas dictate the movement of the paint. In doing so, she expanded the possibilities of abstraction. Her figurative and personal concepts became inherently and intentionally abstracted by her process. Frankenthaler was in a dialogue with her artworks — as an equal partner to her materials she understood that painting was not about control but about expression and contradiction. ‘What a lie,’ she said about her process, ‘what trickery — how beautiful is the very idea of painting.’