Flood
Helen Frankenthaler
HELEN FRANKENTHALER, 1967, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS
In Provincetown, America’s oldest continuous art colony, Helen Frankenthaler began to change. Pivoting from the broadness of her abstract, expressionist beginnings, she started to create softer, stranger works. The extraordinary community and the local landscape provided the time, space and emotion necessary to move her experimental painting practice in new directions. That new direction lay in her ‘soak-stain’ technique - a practice of diluting acrylic paint with turpentine until it had the consistency of watercolour. Flood is archetypal of Frankenthaler's Provincetown period. It is a 'Colour Field' painting - something the artist effectively invented - using liquid pigments and the canvases’ varying absorption effects to create in collaboration with her materials. Never before had figuration and landscape been referenced through such liquid abstraction.