This detail from “Cool Summer” by Helen Frankenthaler (1962) demonstrates the staining technique pioneered by the female artist in the 1950s. Inspired by Jackson Pollock’s action paintings that featured industrial grade paints poured and splattered across canvases placed horizontally on the ground, Frankenthaler sought not to copy Pollock, but “depart from [him].” And depart she did. Frankenthaler too began working on large-scale unprimed canvases laid out on the floor of her studio; but where Pollock flung and dripped, Frankenthaler carefully poured and pushed thinned-down pigments and translucent washes of color across the canvas surface. Her watery clouds of color—sometimes intensely bold and aggressive, other times soft whispers of faint hues—contrasted dramatically with the heavy, thick impasto of American post war painting that was popular at the time. Frankenthaler’s atmospheric swathes of color reveal an interest in the physical properties and viscosity of the material of paint itself, which soak into areas of raw canvas. Can you see the faint “halo” of oil surrounding the pigmentation that has bled outward from the edges of the color and stained the canvas?
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![This detail from “Cool Summer” by Helen Frankenthaler (1962) demonstrates the staining technique pioneered by the female artist in the 1950s. Inspired by Jackson Pollock’s action paintings that featured industrial grade paints poured and splattered across canvases placed horizontally on the ground, Frankenthaler sought not to copy Pollock, but “depart from [him].” And depart she did. Frankenthaler too began working on large-scale unprimed canvases laid out on the floor of her studio; but where Pollock flung and dripped, Frankenthaler carefully poured and pushed thinned-down pigments and translucent washes of color across the canvas surface. Her watery clouds of color—sometimes intensely bold and aggressive, other times soft whispers of faint hues—contrasted dramatically with the heavy, thick impasto of American post war painting that was popular at the time. Frankenthaler’s atmospheric swathes of color reveal an interest in the physical properties and viscosity of the material of paint itself, which soak into areas of raw canvas. Can you see the faint “halo” of oil surrounding the pigmentation that has bled outward from the edges of the color and stained the canvas?](https://scontent-ort2-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/15632a04c52436d82a114fc299b0d134/5D5D5350/t51.2885-15/e35/47692143_2180514765333564_4711737370153217228_n.jpg?_nc_ht=scontent-ort2-2.cdninstagram.com)