Actually, more than a month, immersed in the pages of her biography, with photos of her artwork strewn across my floor and scattered across books opened all over the place.
Joan Mitchell was born on the 12th of February in 1925 at 10:31 PM in Chicago, Illinois*. This will be important for our astrological analysis of her chart.
Throughout her life, she spent time in Chicago, New York, Mexico, and France, both in Paris and the South of France. She is labeled as an abstract expressionist, a term that described the movement she is generally a part of, being an expressive painter who paints from feeling more than objective reality.
Through my research,
I have come to appreciate several things about Joan…
She’s technically proficient - really uses paint, exploring and pushing the medium and it’s variable qualities, their impact on a piece, and it’s design as a whole.
She’s hardcore about her work, abiding by her own high standards and using her athletic background to push her physical adeptness and skillful application.
Joan was very sensitive, and was driven to work with her emotions in painting.
She had synesthesia of multiple kinds, and eidetic memory, both of which she explored throughout her career.
She was devoted to herself, her artistic practice, as exemplified through her dedication to her lifelong journey within psychoanalysis.
She wasn’t afraid to be “different” and do what is best and most compelling to her, regardless of the fact that she went largely unrecognized and unappreciated for the first few decades of her career.
She set out to be generous with her time and knowledge, always lending a hand to younger artists, and establishing a foundation in her name that provides scholarships for young artists.
Joan is criticized for being mean and volatile, and her biography recounts countless interactions with those closest to her where she was sharp and belittling when she had been drinking.
From an artistic perspective, I most appreciate that Joan…
She moves beyond the traditional painting “restrictions”.
She works within the flatness of the surface in dynamic ways, exploring the tension between 2D and 3D, and the relationships between material and color, space, viewer, and the piece itself.
She wasn’t after transforming a canvas into perceivable 3D space.
Instead, she sought to explore movement, motion, shape, emotion, form, color, and impressions of memory and experience.
She preferred privacy around her subject matter, never indulging too much speculation and never pursuing total representation.
She established her own unique language within her paintings, giving rise to brushstrokes and their application as elements of design.
She’s confident with her application of paint, especially later in life, which feels most apparent by admiring her cutting back in with white, and technique of applying a stroke at a time, and moving to the back of the room to analyze design and decide on the next placement.
Joan Mitchell was beyond her time, born into an art world not yet carved with space for women to be. Absolutely despising the label jokingly given to her, “lady painter”, she was in constant opposition to the tension of being a painter/artist and being a woman, and thus not seen as a man.
Joan built a reputation for herself that included the not so pretty sides of humanity, often being rude, confrontational, piercing, and downright disrespectful or abusive towards those she loved. And yet, she was loved anyways.
She was also constantly battling an internal voice and sense of authority that was equally, if not more so, critical, atrocious, and carrying the worst qualities of her abusive, belittling, and sexist father.
It is clear that this relationship with her father was foundational, in all of the ways you’d imagine. It primed her for a life of striving for acceptance, achievement, and approval from someone who always saw her as “second rate” just because she was born a girl.
She was ruthless, yes, but she could be ruthless to herself, too. Joan was the fierce force of woman that we all might aspire to be—absolutely not afraid to—and in fact, enjoying some ruffled feathers. She is an example of a woman fighting to be seen as an accomplished artist before people take into account her being a woman.
Joan was brutally honest, inquisitive and absolutely loved talking about art with artists of all kind.
(To be continued)
Sources:
Albers, Patricia. Joan Mitchell : Lady Painter : A Life. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.
David Zwimmer Video on Youtube
MoMA website
NY Studio School Video on Youtube
Sarah Rehm Roberts, et al. Joan Mitchell. San Francisco, San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art ; New Haven, 2020.
Images:
https://sothebys-com.brightspotcdn.com/13/f7/a458af2a43d5929080df5269aa56/gettyimages-53373489.jpg
https://d7hftxdivxxvm.cloudfront.net/?quality=80&resize_to=width&src=https%3A%2F%2Fartsy-media-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com%2FjYN0S-zXBL1SpcLpgplpCA%252FGettyImages-635942319.jpg&width=910
https://www.astro.com/astro-databank/Mitchell,_Joan
https://www.astrotheme.com/astrology/Joan_Mitchell
https://www.astro-seek.com/birth-chart/joan-mitchell-horoscope
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