City Landscape

City Landscape is a very large painting, a square about two metres on each side, or eighty inches. Joan Mitchell made it in 1955 with oil paint on linen, a woven cloth often used instead of cotton canvas. It is abstract, which means it does not picture recognisable things such as buildings or streets. Instead you meet a web of loosely brushed strands of bright color across the whole surface. Look for yellow, orange, red, pink, purple, green, brown, black, gray and white. The canvas feels full of light and seems to hum with energy.

Joan Mitchell was an American painter influenced by the artists making abstract paintings in New York in the early 1950s. Many of them were called action painters, a name that suggests fast, physical work. Mitchell was different. Although City Landscape looks spontaneous, she worked slowly and deliberately. She would paint a little, then sit and look at the canvas, sometimes for hours. In her words, eventually the painting told her what to do. So the quick-looking strokes you see came out of long, patient looking.

Mitchell did not want her paintings read as self-expression. She once said her abstractions were about landscape, not about her. Here the landscape is a large city. The title suggests that the network of paint is like the nerves or arteries of an urban space, the hidden pathways that carry energy through it. Try standing back, then stepping closer, and choose one strand of color. Follow it across the canvas, and notice where it crosses, joins or disappears among the others.