Helen Frankenthaler

Around the Clock with Red . 1983

+ moma

Helen Frankenthaler was one of the pioneers of the Color Field style of painting that grew out of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s.Like other Abstract Expressionists, Frankenthaler utilized the element of chance in her paintings. While Jackson Pollock embraced chance by splattering paint on his canvas, Frankenthaler loosely applied diluted oil paints to unprimed canvas in a technique later referred to as stain painting due to the stain-like affects resulting from the paint's absorption into the raw canvas. The result, as you can see in Around the Clock with Red, is a painting with large areas of flat color and bits of canvas still peeking through.
hunter museum

Into the West .1977

The Bay . 1963

Southern Exposure . 2005