Helen Frankenthaler

Happy Birthday Helen Frankenthaler!! The American artist Helen Frankenthaler was born in 1928. She was born into a wealthy family from Manhattan and had determined by age 16 that she would become an artist. She was a painter, sculptor and printmaker who was influential in Abstract Expressionism. She experimented in color field painting and used landscape to guide her abstract work. Frankenthaler was married to Robert Motherwell for 13 years and the two surely collaborated on themes, methods and ideas. She developed a style called “soak-stain” method in which she thinned down the paint with turpentine and then poured, spread, wiped it over the large canvas. I was enthused to see her work (see below) in a recent landscape show: A Sense of Place, in Las Vegas at the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art.