Pink Streets and Blue Grass - Joan Mitchell’s Translation of Landscapes into Colour
Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), in addition to being one of the most celebrated Abstract Expressionist artists and a notable representative of the New York School movement, was a remarkable translator. Maybe not in the formal terms; she has never pursued academic language studies, nor has she professionally analysed and translated literary works. She was one because of her ability to turn memories and their emotional residue into visual works of art, translating the language of remembrance into bold strokes of blue, yellow, pink, and more.
A subject often reflected on in her works is landscapes. While it is undeniable that her surroundings were a vessel behind her practice, inspiration was not the most significant thing that she took from it; it would be more accurate to say that Joan Mitchell’s unique perception of them was the essence of her pieces. “I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me. [...] I would like more to paint what it leaves me with.” The canvas became a personally crafted mirror reflecting the experiences that resided inside her, and it was colour that allowed her to translate those feelings into art that embraces, comforts, and encourages. Mitchell employed the power of colour and the boldly gentle strokes of paint not to convey what she remembers; her paintings, prose of colour, do not mirror the factual, physical state of places, objects, and people. Rather, they reflect what they left within her, feelings and expressions that greet her upon recalling that lake, that street, that tree.
City
In 1949, Joan Mitchell moved to New York City and quickly became one of its most renowned artists. Involved in and inspired by the local avant-garde scene, she fully embraced abstraction, abandoning figurative works with her final Figure and The City (1950) ("I knew that it would be my last figure"). In this artistic hub of a city, she painted in her Greenwich Village studio, exhibited her works in numerous shows, both group and solo, dined, drank and art-talked with fellow creatives, many of whom became her life-long friends, inspirations, and mentors.
Living in New York City, Mitchell began working with the urban landscapes she encountered everywhere, at all times. Sky-high buildings, millions of people, friends, acquaintances, lovers - a new world, all things exciting, curious, contradicting, and ever-changing. With sensitivity, attentiveness, and presence, she experienced those surroundings, beings both living and inanimate, and carried them within herself for days, months, if not years, soon to be translated onto canvas.
Her piece from the mid-New York period, titled City Landscape (1955), stands as a proud representative of her urban landscapes. Pale shades of white, grey, purple and blue, resembling marble tiles or paving slabs, establish a still, quiet background for the main rush. There, right in the middle, it erupts - a buzzy mix of horizontal short-stroked colours densely clumped together. It is dynamic and alive. While dominated by darker hues, the cluster comprises brighter colours, such as yellows and oranges. A flirty pink stands in the centre left, and, depending on your perspective, melts to create a base for the whole or erupts from it to stand out from the rest of the explosion. Going down, the cluster melts, the strokes become fewer, longer, less vibrant. Paint stacks and drips.
A City Landscape. What did she see there? The tall grey buildings, the bluish hues of the asphalt streets, or the shadows, unavoidably cast by the architectural limitations of the sun? What was the weather like? Was it sunny, or did it rain? The grey background suggests the latter. Maybe that is why the colours seem to dissolve in the lower part of the canvas, disappearing into puddles of New York streets and reflecting all the lights, all the noise. How about a taxi - the yellow blob of paint in the upper right part of the colourful mess reminds me of the city’s icon. And all the colourful short strokes, are they the people? New Yorkers, tourists, with herself among the crowds? The pink brings a lot of questions, too. I can’t seem to think of a pink object on the city’s streets. A fancy fur coat, or a neon light of a Broadway billboard, maybe?
But there are no puddles, no lights, and no taxis. There are no objects, or people, or landscapes. Instead of these things set in the physical world, on the canvas lay emotions and expressions, a residue from memories that Mitchell embraced, cherished, and sought to immortalise in the material. Looking for those is pointless, because not only will we never find them. Even if we did, we would not perceive them in the way she did. By the time of the painting’s creation, the artist had been living in New York City for 6 years. The streets she walked, the buildings she passed, and the people she knew were all tinted with memories, expressions, and feelings. The same tint, emotional, purely metaphysical, found its way into her paintings, turning yellow, blue, and red. This is the New York that Mitchell remembers, the one that embraced her when she was 24, hosted her first exhibition, introduced her to all the artists and all the friends she would look up to even years later, the one that gave her music, poetry, and art. Is that what the clutter of colour is? The joys and the sorrows, all those lives and all those moments - her first major exhibition “9th Street Show”, Frank O’Hara’s poems (“Poem Read at Joan Mitchell’s”!), The Club on Eighth Street discussing all things art, the streets, the lights, and the concrete - they are all here. They are just yellow, pink, and green. Can you hear the honking of the taxis yet?
Fig.1 Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955, oil on linen, 80 x 80 in. (203.2 x 203.2 cm), Collection Art Institute of Chicago © Estate of Joan Mitchell
Nature
After New York came France. Joan Mitchell’s move to France had an enormous impact on her life and work. She lived in Paris from 1959 and moved to Vétheuil in 1968, a village where she would remain for the rest of her life. There, she engaged with local artists and hosted creative retreats for her American creative friends and young artists. And, probably most significant to her artistic career, she lived within nature, she and her dogs.
The countryside living was spacious and liberating, abundant with greenery, crossed by lakes, Gothic architecture and vegetable gardens. While quite the opposite of the rush and lights of the big city, the French country has proven to be just as artistically fulfilling as New York’s creative living. The choice of her new environment was arguably fueled by her admiration for the masters of impressionism, expressionism, and colour. Seine River, often depicted by Claude Monet in his dreamy landscapes, and sunflowers in her garden, famously loved by Vincent Van Gogh, became Mitchell’s everyday muses, a catalyst for her practice, and simply joy. And though she expressed that she would never be able, or try to, mirror nature, her choice of palette and its manipulation were often direct references to its riches, dynamism, and uniqueness - the elements that resided in her memory for a long time after experiencing it.
Her diptych Weeds (1976) is a bursting ode to nature as a synonym of life, movement, and abundance. Accompanied by darker shades of brown and green, rich blue and bright orange dominate both of the canvases. Lilac purple, pale pink, and, a surprise, turquoise complement the painting set on her classic white background. A difference one notices immediately is the size and motion of the strokes. The left canvas hosts large, thick strokes, fewer in quantity and more authoritarian in their presence. The right one, on the contrary, accommodates an explosion, a dynamic burst of colours, through short strokes spontaneously moving, engaged and co-existing.
Generally, we do know that weeds are not blue, nor, at least in most cases, are they orange - nor pink, nor lilac, nor turquoise. However, since it is Joan Mitchell’s work that we are discussing, we also know that it is not even weeds that we are looking at. We are looking at her poetry and her generous translation. The colours are her language, which she invented and designed. The shades - her vocabulary - expressing her perception of reality and solidifying it in physical means, offer an unparalleled insight into her gently grand mind.
Mitchell’s usage of colours, their enforcement through the dynamism of the paint strokes, and even the format of the painting, a diptych, all require an emotional insight from the viewer. If you want to get it, you must feel it. The left canvas feels more still. The deep blue carries power, kind and soft, yet dominating. The orange, unforgettably here. Are the weeds still? It seems like there is no wind, no movement in the wild fields of Vétheuil. Is it night? Maybe the late afternoon, the orange resembles the bold warmth of a setting sun. Now, the right canvas. A shift, a sudden chaos. The nature sways and tangles. The colours that stood hidden, making a background for the blue and orange, now dance together on the main stage. Turquoise, red, and orange are overwhelming. I can feel the wind, the one that unexpectedly pushes you around and makes the tall grass sound like rattles. You know which one, the one you felt when you walked that hill, or on the edge of that forest.
That is Mitchell’s generosity. She is opening a door for us to take a look at what she saw, sharing her mind and simultaneously encouraging us to admire our own. We are invited to go on a walk with her. She wants us to take a deep breath, look back, and feel.
Joan Mitchell, Weeds, 1976, oil on canvas, 110 1/2 x 157 1/2 in. (280.7 x 400.1 cm) Collection Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden © Estate of Joan Mitchell
As noted by critic Irving Sandler, “the expression of [Mitchell’s] remembered joy has priority over the painting process.” The marvels of Joan Mitchell’s practice shine through her gentle individualism and appreciation of the self in all its versions. While her works are not directed at the audience, they do share. The generosity of colours, of the strokes, large and small, quiet and chaotic, it gives us an insight into her world, an invitation to a shared experience of life as seen through her eyes, encouraging and inspiring. Although we would never see those landscapes, those buildings, those people, and those lights like she did, oranges, blues, and pinks create a space for us to take a step backwards. What city do you remember? What fields come to your mind? Mitchell proves to us that the past is something worth commemorating, a vivid celebration of that which has passed. All is alive as long as it is remembered, and Joan Mitchell, with her shades of remembrance, hues of joy, and tones of grief, keeps those landscapes immortal.
Sources
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Barcio, Phillip. “How the 9th Street Art Exhibition Stepped Out of the New York Art Canons in 1951.” Ideel Art Magazine (blog), August 23, 2018. Accessed August 12, 2025. Web blog post. https://ideelart.com/blogs/magazine/how-the-9th-street-art-exhibition-stepped-out-of-the-new-york-art-canons-in-1951
Cascone, Sarah. 2021. “’We Wanted to Unmoor Her from the 1950s’: A Joan Mitchell Retrospective at SFMOMA Shows the Artist as You’ve Never Seen Her Before.” Artnet News, September 20, 2021. Accessed August 17, 2025. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/joan-mitchell-retrospective-sfmoma-2010218
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Hinton, Gayla. “Joan Mitchell Saw Sounds as Colors.” Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (blog), July 25, 2024. Accessed August 12, 2025. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art blog. https://crystalbridges.org/blog/joan-mitchell-saw-sounds-as-colors/
Ideel Art. “Vibrancy and Energy in Joan Mitchell Paintings.” Ideel Art Magazine, n.d. Accessed August 12, 2025. Blog post. https://ideelart.com/blogs/magazine/vibrancy-and-energy-in-joan-mitchell-paintings
Joan Mitchell Foundation. “Joan Mitchell: Biography.” Joan Mitchell Foundation. Accessed August 17, 2025.
https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/joan-mitchell/biography
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Lindquist, Greg. 2011. “JOAN MITCHELL: The Last Paintings.” The Brooklyn Rail, December. Accessed August 17, 2025.
https://brooklynrail.org/2011/12/artseen/joan-mitchell-the-last-paintings/
Nemett, Barry. 2022. “Sensing Joan Mitchell.” Two Coats of Paint, May 15, 2022. Accessed August 17, 2025.
https://twocoatsofpaint.com/2022/05/sensing-joan-mitchell.html
Phillips. n.d. “Joan Mitchell in Another Dimension.” Phillips. Accessed August 17, 2025.
Sandler, Irving. “Mitchell Paints a Picture.” ARTnews 56 (October 1957): 44-47, 69-70. PDF file, accessed via Joan Mitchell Foundation, https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/uploads/pdf/1957_October_ARTnews.pdf.
Tate. “Joan Mitchell.” Tate. Accessed August 12, 2025. Web page. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/joan-mitchell-6461
Winchell, Louisa. “When ‘the Club’ Ruled the Art World from East 8th Street.” Village Preservation (blog), April 3, 2019. Accessed August 12, 2025. Web page. https://www.villagepreservation.org/2019/04/03/when-the-club-ruled-the-art-world-from-east-8th-street/
Images
Joan Mitchell, City Landscape, 1955, oil on linen, 80 x 80 in. (203.2 x 203.2 cm) Collection Art Institute of Chicago © Estate of Joan Mitchell https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/joan-mitchell/artwork/0006-city-landscape
Joan Mitchell, Weeds, 1976, oil on canvas, 110 1/2 x 157 1/2 in. (280.7 x 400.1 cm) Collection Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden © Estate of Joan Mitchell https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/joan-mitchell/artwork/0058-weeds
