Sunflower III

Joan Mitchell

One of Joan Mitchell's most sought after color etchings. The Joan Mitchell Foundation makes this statement about the Sunflower series:

"In 1972 Mitchell returned to printmaking, this time to make etchings with Arte Adrian Maeght, Paris. These prints demonstrate one of the earliest uses of a favorite leitmotif, sunflowers, which grew in Mitchell’s gardens at Vétheuil where she had settled a few years prior.

These etchings, in burnt and bleached tones of sun and sky, reflect the life cycle of the sunflower. Particulate marks come together like matter coalescing to form a flower and hold together in the looseness of its subsequent disintegration. Sunflower-like forms emerge and dissipate in a riotous, scratchy landscape of growth. The autumnal tones of the Sunflower series point to Mitchell’s identification with the feeling of the dying sunflower."

See more at: http://joanmitchellfoundation.org/work/artwork/cat/prints#sthash.EYvCObRt.dpuf