Joan Mitchell Quotes

[Mitchell wanted in her painting].. the feeling in a line of poetry which makes it different from, a line of prose.. .Sentimentality is self-pity, your own swamp. Weeping in your own beer is not a feeling. It lacks dignity and hasn't an outside reference.

I'm not religious or anything like that. [But] a little more spiritual something or other.. .A little more 'feeling'. And there's my word again. You know?.. .And I find that.. ..[pauses], I find that uninspiring, and if I hung around too much I might find it very deadly. If I let it enter my studio. And it would be hard not to have it enter.

I might get an idea [for the start of a painting] sitting looking at the river, or something, or a specific.. ..Yeess. I'm sure, yes, I'm sure it [the environment] influences me in terms of green and gray and color and.. .I mean, New York light is so different, and it always hits me when I come here [in New York], and it excites me to see great extremes of dark and light and no nuance - which I love. But there the Isle de France [round about Paris] has that, you know, filtered light that is that.. where even on a gray day, the green is very green, and the red is very red.. ..I think walking out barefoot and moving the paintings, being able to move them out of my studio [in Vetheuil] for transportation, things like that have had [influence].. .As well as the landscape. Lake Michigan was pretty important, you know.

Pop Art, Op Art, Flop Art and Slop Art.. .I fall into the last two categories [her remark, in the mid 1970’s] .

I've have tried to take from everybody [every artist in American Abstract Expressionism ].. .I can't close my eyes or limit my experiences.. .Because I live now, I am more interested in art now. It's different as any art is different from period to period. But it's no better or worse.

That's where, I think, I changed for that 'Grande Vallée' subject [a large series of 'natural' paintings, Joan painted during 1982-83], which was really not a subject - the 'Grande Vallée' was a [wild vast] place where this Gisele Barreaux [composer] played with her cousin when they were children, and the cousin, aged 28, died of cancer. And she told me he said to her [when he was dying in 1982], 'If we could only return to the Grande Vallee once again,' as he was dying. I mean, that was what that was all about, so that was a subject of.. .You know, it was the summer my sister died - the same week - and we went to the Manet show. [in '82].. ..when I started the 'Grande Vallée'.. .And I was stuck on a subject, and I thought, 'This is very true and very simple,' and I thought, 'Shit, I'll paint the Grande Vallée for her.' And now, I got her to tell me about it, and it was green and blue, and it was just a vast sort of territory outside Nantes [in Brittany, France]. And so that's how I got started on that whole series.

It's [the color white] death. It's hospitals. It's my terrible nurses. You can add in Melville, Moby Dick a chapter on white. White is absolute horror. It is just the worst. [quote c. 1957]

Oh, early Kandinsky.. [stuck her early] .Well no, they had that at the Art Institute in Chicago, don't forget. See, everybody, to do 'modern art' then [New York, mid-forties], seemed to me, when you were going 'modern' [both chuckle], it was Picasso. I mean, everybody. But I avoided that like the plague. I thought.. .I loved Picasso, but it just wasn't for me.. .Well, I don't! I have some of those [early] paintings from LeLavandou - they're in storage - and from Mexico. They were Expressionist landscapes, or boats on the beach or something like that, which I still do. Sort of going abstract, going towards..

When I came back [from a temporary stay in Paris] and heard you play with Charles Mingus, and when you and Cecil Taylor [also a free Jazz musician] opened up the 'Five Spot' in the Fall of 1956, I felt better about being in New York. All the musicians who create from the gut as well as their intellect can change things. People will never understand what we are doing if they can't feel.. .All art is abstract. All music is abstract. But it's all real.. .When you improvise, I can see the seeds of a symphony you could write. When I first heard Charlie Parker in Chicago, I could see he was a symphony.. ..we were all trying to bring that spirit, that spontaneous energy, into our work. [talking to jazz-player David Anram in the jazz club the 'Five Spot', in 1956, she was visiting with Franz Kline ].

Light is something very special. It has nothing to do with white. Either you see it or you don't. [George] de la Tour doesn't have light; Monet hasn't any light. Matisse, Goya, Chardin, Van Gogh, Sam Francis, Kline have it. But it has nothing to do with being the best painter at all.

I've always been told that I was a painter's painter.. .What does that mean?.. .That painters like my painting and the big wide world overlooks it, I suppose?.. .Well, I know.. .To me, it would have meant that - this is pre this new rage in buying and selling paintings - that, I think, that the formal values, like light, space, color, all those things that a painting is made up of, as well as the Jacob going up the ladder or Venus on the half shell or something [chuckles] would be what interested the painter. And perhaps the public would want the picture of the Christ child, so to speak. You know what I mean.

I'm not so sure I could have done otherwise, but I wish I.. .I'm re-going to a French shrink now, and she's helped me a lot. I wish I'd gone sooner, because I think women are inclined more than men to be self-destructive, and I really think I had the masochistic medal there for a while, and I, you know, I want to, that I wish I had stopped. I think it's also very masochistic to sit and cry in my spilt Scotch for areas in my life that have been very creepy and that I should have cut, left sooner. So what's, that's, I feel sorry about that. But I'm getting to [me, be] perhaps more, oh, I don't know, trying to look at that in a more positive way. Maybe I got something out of that too, I don't know.. .Maybe. I mean.. .I feel also uncomfortable about staying in France, but then, if I could only make sort of a.., instead of saying negative, 'I'm too lazy to move,' a positive thing, 'I really like this house. I really like this view. I really like Paris better than New York' - or not better, or equally, or differently, or something, which is quite true - instead of sitting - which I can do, I used to do - and missing the country and missing New York, or missing France.

I started in, got it [former Monet's house, where he lived 1878 - 1881 in Vetheuil; [Mitchell bought the house and used it mainly first in the weekends] in summer of 67, Yeah, well, and then I started.. .I was still painting at Fremicourt and I remember starting the 'Sunflowers' [series, c. 1969-72], which I saw in Vetheuil and painted them in Fremicourt, you see.. .The thing about [the studio in] Fremicourt, also about St. Marks: I had to roll [large] paintings to get them out, which was a real drag, because of thickness [of the paint which cracked]. And when I started painting in Vetheuil, you can just take the [stretched] paintings out [in open air]. Well, that really changed unconsciously an awful lot of.. .Walk them out stretched, it's great.

I'm trying to remember what I felt about a certain cypress tree and I feel if I remember it, it will last me quite a long life.

I don't make drips [in her painting] purposely. This drip business is a pile of shit. If I see them, I take them out [of her painting] like cleaning the house.