Hours

Bursts of blue, green, red, and bright lime sweep across this large two-panel painting by Joan Mitchell, an American artist who became one of the leading voices of Abstract Expressionism. Painted in 1982, "Hours" shows her gift for turning raw emotion and memory into color and motion. Mitchell spent much of her later life in Vétheuil, France, in a house once near Claude Monet's old home, and the influence of the surrounding landscape often crept into her work. She always insisted her paintings were not pictures of places but feelings about them, the way a garden or a stretch of light might linger in the mind.

Look closely and you can see the energy in every brushstroke, with paint dripping down the canvas and colors layered over one another in quick, confident moves. There is a sense of light fighting through the tangle of marks, and the title hints at the passing of time, perhaps the changing hours of a single day. Mitchell worked on a grand scale and often painted standing back from the canvas, studying it carefully before committing to each gesture. The result feels spontaneous, but it was the product of real thought and a lifetime of practice.