Professional Skills & Career Path
Tate Britain prints and drawings room archive visit for Helen Frankenthaler’s work.
Frankenthaler acknowledged that she had ‘never wanted to illustrate or “explain” the contents of ... [her] work in word-and-picture format’, and instead, began without a text to create ‘this book that is not a book’
(Helen Frankenthaler, ‘Apologia’, This Is Not A Book, 1997).
As she notes in the Apologia:
For most of us, most of the time, horizontal usually implies landscape, vertical implies personage. There are no rules. Does my ‘reader’ see nightscapes, climates and environments, interiors, moods of joy, spirits, love, passion, expressions of rage or playfulness, planets, prone or upright figures, whimsical gardens, storms, mythical gods, geographical or atmospheric scenery? Perhaps. Hopefully, these pages provide a growing and truth-giving order, pleasure, a fresh light and a kind of recognition.
Taking a closer look at her print on lithographs and etching, the quality of lines and colour is very unique. The mixed use of oil based ink from the same plate on etching and different watercolour on each print show the physicality of the paint, also showing the pressure of line, but in a form of lightness.
In This Is Not A Book, every print has similar lines as a base layer, as she made them with the same etching plate. Later, so added the colour, some are in blocks and some are floating around the surface. I enjoy the clearness from some of the colours at the same time coherence with the firm dark lines from etching.
In her lithography works, The colour and texture made me relate to some free form painting, an abstracted form of paint. Which is so different from the area in print. It seems like we do not even have to identify it as a print, but simply an application of paint. It buried the border of paint and painting, or drawing. The form of creation is not limited to the way to make it.
Picking up fragments from nature.
I think about my process of making and my relationship with nature. For the image I usually depict in painting is landscape-like space. Which is not a specific space but suggesting a possibility of thinking about the relationship with space. The general thoughts about myself with places, my identity and feelings towards how the environment touches me deeply.
Influenced by the documentary The last forest, in relation with what she notes in the Apologia, the horizontal image could be an implication of everything, a feeling, a sense, non physical changes and visual elements from all around. To me it is a strong bond of human connection with nature itself. Which requires an open mind and heart, there is infinite space to discover and reimagine. Recreating a sense, an experience, and reality.
