Painter Amy Sillman revisits Joan Mitchell’s painting Wood, Wind, No Tuba (1979), tracing shared connections between the two-step rhythm of abstraction and music
I don’t know whether to describe Joan Mitchell’s painting Wood, Wind, No Tuba (1979) as a place or a time, a spatial or a sonic event, and maybe that’s what makes it so great. Maybe that’s what all painting is: a glorious no-place, or an elsewhere, or, in Mitchell’s case, both things at once. After all, this might be one giant painting, or it might be a painting of two parts or times set next to each other in a perceptual parallax view. The two parts hit you as one immense and luxuriant curtain of colour that crashes over you, like a tidal wave, like a rapture. But it’s impossible not to notice that the two sides are not merely a continuation of the same big wave, as if Mitchell is purposefully signalling us to think of the painting as one place that unfurls as two moments: a painting with a beat in the middle. And the title Wood, Wind, No Tuba, with its unlikely duo of woodwind with (or without) tuba, reinforces this sense of the musical. So maybe the work is a kind of score, the play-by-play of a mass of strokes getting denser from this moment to the next, as they move from left to right, eastward, like weather, wind, or like weather and music, both the wind and the ‘wood wind’. The two panels gather harmonically into one simultaneous experience, this giant scrim of orangey-yellow strokes dropping their weight and filling up our field of vision. The curtain is left open at the bottom ever so slightly, the bare white canvas gently visible underneath all this tumult, suggesting that you can get just under, through, and behind the colour. This is especially so on the left panel, where two singular vertical lavender strokes stand out alone like hyacinth stalks, rising up to meet the thrum of oranges that drops down above and around them.
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