[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, yo… - Joan Mitchell

[being a woman in the Artists Club, there were] Elaine Elaine de Kooning, Mercedes Matter.. .Well May Rosenberg, but she wasn't a painter. Jane Freilicher. Nell Blaine.. .Well, there were Grace [ Grace Hartigan ] and Helen [ Helen Frankenthaler ], of course.. .How did I feel, like how? I felt, you know, when I was discouraged I wondered if really women couldn't paint, the way all the men said they [the women] couldn't paint. But then at other times I said, 'Fuck them,' you know. But I think the women were, some of them, more down on women than the men.. .I adulated the men so much they sort of liked me. I mean, I thought Bill [ Willem deKooning ] was a great painter. They liked me.. .Hans Hofmann was very supportive -of me. I used to run into him in the park. I'd be dog-walking at nine in the morning, he'd say, 'Mitchell, you should be painting.' Very nice. [both chuckle] I don't think women in any way were a threat to these men, so they could encourage the 'lady painter.'

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.

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.