Helen Frankenthaler, Canyon, 1965
From the Philip’s Collection:
During the 1960s, Frankenthaler moved away from her use of drips and splatters of paint toward larger single stains and blots. In 1963 she began using acrylic paint as opposed to turpentine-thinned oil, resulting in the expansion of form and the production of bolder, more saturated colors. Canyon of 1965, painted in acrylic, exemplifies Frankenthaler’s paintings of the 1960s as it flows out from a boldly colored center, in this case red. The painting takes advantage of the fluid nature of acrylic paint, which floods laterally across the surface of a canvas to create a hard, defined edge rather than a soft, blotted edge as in the thinned oil paint she used in her earlier work. Frankenthaler was attracted to the more saturated and intense effects of acrylic paint and the color relationships she could produce using this medium.
