Joan Mitchell (1925-1992)

Although her compositions were resolutely abstract, Mitchell was famously inspired by her memories of landscapes. Her works offer poetic manifestations on the feelings that memories of landscape inspire. As she explained in 1958, around the time she painted the present canvas, "I paint from remembered landscapes that I carry with me -- and remembered feelings of them, which of course become transformed. I could certainly never mirror nature. I would like more to paint what it leaves me with" (Letter to J. I. H. Baur, 1958, printed in Nature in Abstraction: The Relation of Abstract Painting and Sculpture to Nature in Twentieth Century American Art, New York, Whitney Museum, 1958).