April's Mood
On feeling things out and colouring things in
As spring begins to thaw out some of the things I didn’t even realise had frozen over winter, there’s a flood of new colours and shapes lining the streets and shading in my days. Amongst fluorescent feelings, it’s sometimes hard to fit it all into two eyes and one brain.
This time last year, Helen Frankenthaler’s April Mood greeted me, sudden and singing, straight through the doors of the Whitechapel Gallery. Painted in 1974, it is a vast swathe of liquid acrylic colour, poured onto unprimed canvas in Frankenthaler’s signature soak stain technique. She described her process as drawing with colour and in April Mood, the colours draw us into the shapes of an abstract internal landscape.
Above a lilac horizon and a burgundy undercurrent, squalls of spring skies shift from dark blue to slate. A grey edge brightens and seeps down to meet the ochre ground. Stretching up to the right, caressing a small patch of grass green, ochre turns to sandy earth until it meets a lick of bright pink. This pink draws our eye skywards, with the same power to shift my focus up as soft bursts of fresh pink cherry blossom. Like a pair of hands, bitten pink by the wind, it picks up winter days and begins to stretch them into summer shapes, making space for new landscapes to layer on top of old.
I wonder what mood she was in when she painted this? 1974 would have been Frankenthaler’s 46th version of April, 2024 is my 28th. Remembering this painting, I revisited Ninth Street Women (a collective autobiography of Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler by Mary Gabriel), and one of the many lines by Helen Frankenthaler that I underlined was this: “I am in my own head and going faster than my own head.”
It’s certainly a mood I recognise, as days flick through all four seasons, blowing blue skies through to hail and back again. One that feels like the blusters of dust and blossom dancing together across London pavements. Running through Regent’s Park on the first spring evening that added an extra hour of daylight to fill, feels like a moment of the opposite: out of my own head and slowing to its own pace. Like the expansive breath of cold blue, it’s a moment slow enough at least to absorb the slate London skies above me and recognise them as a stroke of my own landscape.
This April's mood also led me to Betty Parsons’ show at Alison Jaques, mostly intrigued by a quote I read by Parsons: “I saw all the movement, the noise, the colour, the excitement, the passion… I thought, my God, how can you ever capture this except in an abstract sense.” Echoing the feeling I’d recognised in front of Frankenthaler’s stretched swathes of colour last spring, I wanted to see how her abstractions might make sense of April’s shifting moods.
Helen Frankenthaler credited Betty Parsons with having been able to “construct the centre of the art world”, but she wasn’t referring to her paintings. Parsons was best known as a leading gallerist in New York during her lifetime (1900-82). Her same eye, which spotted and nurtured some of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism at Betty Parsons Gallery, also applied to her own canvas. In 1947, Parsons arrived at abstraction with her own brush, the same year that her gallery exhibited works by Mark Rothko and Hans Hoffman and the year before Jackson Pollock.
Parsons’ work uses colour to express place and translate the energy that she saw as the most permanent presence underscoring our reality. Scale isn’t important and neither really is shape. As she shifts from paper to canvas, painted collage to sculpture, it is through colour that she is able to revel in an ‘invisible presence’ and find a language that could hold experience without trying to describe it.
I’ve always been fascinated with what I call ‘the invisible presence’. The most permanent thing in this world is the invisible; you never get away from it. – Betty Parsons
On the walls at Alison Jaques, the colour I can’t get away from is red. It’s a colour I don’t normally settle on or in. From Opposition (1962), where red is centred and soft beneath terracotta tones and scratches to the surface beneath organic white forms, to Summer Fire (1959) where it’s vibrant, urgent orange hues occupy the same position on the canvas but contrast beneath a paler blue, peeking through almost figurative forms to take on duller tones. Red flickers and buds, smiling in Caribbean Lights (1974), dancing in lines in Fun (1974) and slouching to support two reclining figures in Bahamas (1950). Red is a circle, layered between blue and brown in Circles (1967), a bracket, a forward slash and a stripe in Found Forms (1978).
As her red explores its shapes and shades, it accumulates in an impermanent imagination of permanence. It’s the same colour filtered through different light, filling different shapes. By continually playing with transforming it into something unfamiliar, each composition can be seen as a fresh new discovery.
Now, as I write these thoughts into something (quite abstract), April’s weeks have mostly passed. Scrolling back through my photos on my phone and lines in my notebook (helpful second & third brains), reading about Virginia Woolf’s own explorations*, I wonder how red could provide language for a version of this April’s moods.
*“To determine whether words could behave as paint… A new vocabulary was becoming available to her: forms, colour, texture.” - Harriet Baker, Rural Hours
Red is tulips emerging in terracotta, their hopeful heads light enough to dance between leafy greens. It is the checks of a terrace tablecloth, a grid beneath glasses of sparkling wine, crusty bread, salted butter and conversations. A preview of summer flavours in a bowl of strawberries. The upside-down lines of George Baselitz’s repeated figures. A smile brought out by the corner of Toulouse-Lautrec’s carpet on a postcard. It glints, it hints, it gathers, it ranges and arranges into a fluid foundation for another month.
Thanks the Rom xx
Great writing M! Red being too -I think-the colour for Aries.