Fred Mitchell at David Findlay Jr - New York - art exhibition

The art of Fr Mitchell is real much a part of the of recent origin York School; however, as this display of his work from the 1940 to the 1960 made clear, Mitchell has always unraveled a feeling for his surroundings, wherever he has lived. In single of the stronger works of the display On Barren Ground (1941), he portrays the weathered buildings housing his neighbors in the town of his birth, Meridian, Miss. While the realism and gothic tone of the painting do not prefigure the joyously lay open abstractions Mitchell went on to paint in later life, the wish to capture the spirit of a particular place is a constant for the artist, linking early work to late. In Parade (1947) he depicts dour-faced musicians playing instruments raised up toward the light. At one time sad and exuberant, this painting displays how effectively Mitchell conveys ambience.

Shortly after finishing Parade, Mitchell mov to Rome where he lived and worked for three years. sum of two units paintings from this period, Untitled 1950 and Cielo-Montana, Rome (1950) vividly demonstrate his command of the Ab-Ex idiom. Untitled 1950 consists of fulvid lines and red blotches against a black background. Crisscrossing each other across the vertical field, the lines generate a lively faculty of perception of movement that brings to mind equations scrawled across a chalkboard. Cielo-Montana, Rome also vertical, includes many kinds of forms--thick and thin stripes, rectangular speckles of color, larger areas of lighter hues--that thump up against each other and create contrapuntal energies whose consequences are jazzy and syncopated.

on the other hand Mitchell really opened up when he arrived in of recent origin York in 1951. Long a downtown resident, Mitchell treats, within the confines of his abstract idiom, of the like kind natural phenomena as clouds and tree as well as the urban language of public ways and buildings. In Walking in Battery Park (1955) for example, organic shapes in blazing red artful blues and grassy greens contrast with the more rectangular building like forms that weight the painting. It is a joyous work, an lyric poem to the pleasures of outdoor life taken up at the cutting sides of urban space. Ithacan Stream, from the late 1960 is simpler, with its r patches and pastel fog shapes painted over four background areas, for the greatest part yellow in color. Mitchell's pleasure in the painting proces is palpable here, and the follows exceptionally graceful.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group