Graze

Stretching over seven feet in scale, Graze enfolds the viewer in a lyrical green expanse. Helen Frankenthaler’s emotional, expressionistic use of color, gesture and composition in this work exists in tandem with a close observation of nature. The atmospheric washes of saturated greens and blues are layered with swaths of dark green, red, yellow, white and purple, both thinly and thickly brushed and spilled along its length, evoking delicate green reflections across glistening water or the depth of a lush pastoral landscape – as the title suggests. The allusion to a panoramic landscape is reinforced by the work’s grand horizontal orientation that reaches into the periphery, recalling JMW Turner’s luminous watercolors and Mark Rothko’s transcendent expanses of color. Graze combines Frankenthaler’s signature processes of staining with expressive painterliness, accident with control, and the reality and abstraction of nature.
Frankenthaler, a renowned second-generation Abstract Expressionist painter, inspired Color Field artists Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis with her signature soak-stain technique that collapsed figure and ground by pouring diluted paint directly onto unprimed canvas. In the mid-1970s, a pivotal period which this work exemplifies, she introduced texture and tactility through gestures of action painting, building up layers of dense paint onto full-flooded stained canvases, once describing this painterliness as infusing flat surfaces with “…an intense play of drama of space, movements, light, illusion, different perspectives, [and] elements in space” (J. Elderfield, Color Into Line: Helen Frankenthaler, Paintings 1962-1987, Beverly Hills, 2016, p. 52).