Hours

Sweeping strokes of blue, deep green, red, and electric lime crowd across this large diptych by Joan Mitchell, an American painter who helped push Abstract Expressionism into new territory. Made in 1982 and titled "Hours," it captures her talent for turning feeling and memory into pure color and movement. By this point Mitchell was living in Vétheuil, France, in a house not far from where Claude Monet once lived. The countryside around her often found its way into her work, though she was firm that her paintings were never scenes of a place. They were about the feeling a place left behind, like the way a garden or a burst of light can stay with you long after you have looked away.

The paint here drips and layers in quick, sure gestures, giving the whole surface a restless energy. Light seems to push through the dense knots of color, and the title nudges us toward time itself, maybe the shifting hours across one long day. Mitchell liked to work big, and she often stepped away from the canvas to think before laying down a single mark. That habit shows. What looks fast and instinctive was actually built on careful judgment and decades of practice, a balance of wild feeling and steady control.