Mooring by Joan Mitchell, 1971. Image via WikiArt.org.
Last spring, some weeks after surgery, my friend A-M and I visited the Baltimore Museum of Art to view an exhibition on Joan Mitchell. I was still using a walking cane and bored with making rounds through the kitchen, TV room, and library. Despite the blanket of wool and pain relievers beneath which I slept, I wrestled with various anxieties—personal, professional, political—a “three-P cocktail” guaranteed to induce Gloria Swanson-like swooning. My husband, ever a patient caretaker, more than deserved a break.
As for Joan Mitchell, she was a highly successful painter from the “New York School” of abstract expressionism during the male-dominated art scene of the 1950s and ‘60s. Mitchell was especially prolific: her work and style stand on their own, though she is often referenced alongside Van Gogh and Monet—likely comparisons given that she spent a fair portion of her life in rural France painting fractal light and landscapes.
Mitchell was an interdisciplinary artist: her creative modes crossed into music and poetry. It’s not hard to find intonation in her vivid colors and shapes, precision in her brushstrokes. She inspired my friend, who works in acrylics, to create a series of new works in the week following our visit.
My fascination with Mitchell bent toward the psychological: her images took unease and disarray head-on— teasing, dancing, wrestling with it. We’re all of us uneasy, all the time, she seemed to say: and what of it?
To be unmoored is to be untethered from safe harbor—an apt description of our national mood during the pandemic, political upheavals, and severe weather events—not to mention personal unmooring owing to uncertain pathways, aging, illness. The Unmoored Menu goes on and on. (I speak not of Grief, a whole other thing.)
Wandering the galleries, I cleaved to Mitchell’s large-scale murals, to her splashes and scrubbings, which—in their chaos—nonetheless evoked the order and patterning found in nature. (I later learned that one of her paintings was born of watching trees outside her window, while she recovered from hip surgery.)
What had unmoored our country during Mitchell’s time? The Vietnam War, Civil Rights struggles and street riots, Cold War tensions, emerging technologies. So much has changed, so much is the same. Will it ever not be?
I thought how national unmooring has been interpreted by other artists whose finely tuned radars have received and channeled it: James Baldwin, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, The Beatles [later era], Nina Simone, some of Marvin Gaye’s music, Joan Didion, to name a spartan few. That list, too, is near inexhaustible.
Later that afternoon, my friend and I processed the day and exhaled over lunch. The ache I had felt dissipated into ribbons of meandering conversation and laughter, like the lines in Mitchell’s paintings. It was interesting how placidity waited patiently on the other side of Mitchell’s complex portals: no doubt, she knew that going in.
I will always marvel at the capacity of art to boomerang us into distant discomfort, while simultaneously calling us back to our harbors: to our pets and plants, our family and friends. It helps, a little, knowing that sometimes order, progress, and even justice may arise from chaos; though just as often, they don’t.
Sometimes disarray is disarray, and unease is unease. Sometimes a day’s outing with a dear friend is the best harbor amid a storm that never really ends.