How to look at an abstract painting | Joan Mitchell | P… — Transcript

- [Interviewer] What is it that makes a painter?

- [Joan] That makes a painter?

- [Interview] Yeah.

- [Joan] Oh, some sort of sickness. I mean, you can't do without it, it's like an addiction. You have to go on doing it. It's, I don't know. Well, nothing is indispensable, to paint was indispensable.

(intense music) (birds chirping)

- [Helen] We're here today at David Zwirner Gallery in this Joan Mitchell show. Amy Sillman, painter, writer, old friend. Erin Kimmel, art historian, critic, and part of the research team on the most recent Joan Mitchell retrospective, currently in Paris.

One of the things I think about abstraction is we all think we know what it means. It's also like this little secret handshake that happens in the art world. Like art people are people who understand abstraction. And then people outside the art world are like, what the fuck is that? Like why is, you know, from everything as jejune as, "Why is that art?" to like, "Okay, I actually like it and feel moved by it, but I have no idea—"

- [Amy] How to talk about it.

- [Helen] How to talk about it.

- [Amy] That's very common.

- [Helen] Like what, what—

- [Amy] Yeah.

- [Helen] What am I looking at? But how would you guys, you as an abstract painter, and you as an art historian, like if you had to explain to someone who you really loved and who was really smart and they said to you, "I don't know anything about art. So like, when you say abstract painting, what do you mean?" What would you say to that person?

- [Erin] I would say that it's a set of relationships. Like I guess a non-verbal language, based on a sort of expanding set of relationships.

- [Helen] What about you as a practitioner?

- [Amy] I've always thought that you're in your studio, you're listening to the radio, you're not listening to the radio, but somebody walks by, you hear some news that echoes in your head all day even if you did turn the radio off. How could you get out of language and how could you get out of space and how could you get out of the feeling of there being something slightly extrinsic to your own skin limit and slightly intrinsic to that feeling?

- [Helen] Mm-hm.

- [Amy] Like how can you, that's what it is to be a human. So, I don't think that anybody's abstract if it means there's no language.

- [Helen] Right.

- [Amy] Because we are the language animal.

- [Helen] Right.

- [Amy] We, we—

- [Helen] Yes.

- [Amy] We are.

- [Helen] So, abstract painting is for Mitchell, I think also a language, right? Two-inch brushes, three-inch brushes, unprimed canvas, gessoed canvas. Like these are all building blocks of a language that we now associate with abstract painting.

But, I think—

- [Helen] Right.

- [Amy] She's not trying to make it look like the cosmos or something.

- [Helen] Right.

- [Amy] Or a cloud. She's trying to work within like a material that she's committed herself to and then stretch that material as far as it can go.

- [Helen] Right, I think that that's right. And I think she's also working within the tradition of like a 500-year tradition of Western oil painting. I mean she's thinking about Van Gogh as much as she's thinking about the difference it seems to me and the color she was able, the paint she was able to buy in the States versus the oil paint she's able to buy in—

- [Amy] Right.

- [Helen] In France, of course, they're the same cobalt violet as in Monet, like that's the color of the land that she's in. Like it's his garden, her garden, and that's the color that's there. It's not like she's not, it's not abstract at that level. It's actually like has a kind of one-to-one reference to the experience she's having.

- [Joan] No, I always paint with the windows closed 'cause the sun comes in and I could never possibly copy that. It's so much more beautiful than anyone thinks.

- [Interviewer] What do you do?

- [Joan] Well, I look at that or I have a feeling of remembered feelings of nature. Of nature and I paint out of landscape entirely, but I can't copy it, it's too good the way it is.

- [Helen] In the literature, and I think just in our experience of Joan Mitchell's paintings, she's often described equally as an abstract painter and as a landscape painter. And I kind of synthesize these things in my head, but if I think about them I realize like they don't actually work so well together. And I guess I wanted to ask both of you, what does it mean to call someone both an abstract painter and a landscape painter?

- [Amy] I don't think of her as a landscape painter.

- [Helen] Okay.

- [Amy] I mean, you know, she paints things that are related to space.

- [Helen] Mm-hm.

- [Amy] You know? And I think for her space has feeling as well as form having feeling, and color, and mark, et cetera, et cetera. But I know that air and trees and stuff are all around her and that they're infusing the work in a lot of ways. But, I guess a landscape painter is somebody who represents earth and sky and the condition of gravity and stuff. And certainly the condition of gravity is not here. Things are weighted in their own way. And you know, like the book says, "I carry the landscape with me." I mean, I think what that means is not, there's a landscape inside me and I'm going to portray it. I think what it more means is that the landscape isn't a category. It's similar to other feelings that you also carry with you. You know?

- [Helen] Mm-hm. What about you, Erin? Do you see her as a landscape painter?

- [Erin] I do see her as a landscape painter, but I think landscape is a very fraught term like art historically. Yeah, we think of it in this really traditional sort of horizontal way. But I think she's painting perception essentially.

- [Helen] Right.

- [Erin] Kind of recording perception, trying to sort of put stored perception onto a canvas. I mean, often she's looking out at land and I see landscape in the paintings too. Like, I can see the depth makes me feel like—

- [Amy] We're laughing 'cause—

- [Erin] Yes.

- [Amy] We don't all see depth the same.

- [Erin] Right, right, right.

- [Amy] But, I mean I think that a landscape painter...

...would be a person who not only, we all see landscape 'cause we all walk through it all day.

- [Helen] Right.

- [Amy] But do they deliver landscape, you know? So, I mean I think like what does she deliver? To me she doesn't deliver a reiteration of the walk through the woods in a painting.

- [Helen] So, interesting, I mean, even when I first walked into this gallery and saw the painting that's behind us, it immediately made me think of the big Cezanne bathers in Philadelphia. Except without the figures.

- [Amy] One of the things that I think is interesting to think about is how she is connected to Monet, though she doesn't want to be considered in that lens entirely. But, like if you think what does Monet do with a landscape? He also does something that moves it very far in a way towards abstraction and away from any kind of like rational sense of like Earth's edge, horizon line, you know? Yeah, there's a cloud, but the cloud is reflected on the plane of the water, for instance. So, what you're literally looking at isn't there.

- [Helen] Right.

- [Amy] You know what I mean? So, once you're removed enough sort of in a sort of structural sense, you're no longer delivering a landscape. You're only delivering what we hold in our experience of a landscape. And I guess I would say that marks it as being pretty far away from the source.

- [Helen] Yeah. It's interesting, I don't, I mean it's, I don't know. What do you think, Erin?

- [Erin] I think it is far away from the source in the sense that it's mediated through her. And I think she closed the windows whenever she painted and she also listened to music often, she said to sort of get the consciousness, her self-consciousness out and just I think become a sort of medium for that physical sensation. So, I understand what you're saying.

- [Amy] And she also said, "I hate nature." I mean she literally disavows, she pits herself a

- [Helen] Like I never feel when I'm looking at a Joan Mitchell painting that she's making a painting about a room or about interior space.

Do you know what I mean? I always feel that there is something about both the scale, the gesture, the composition, and the palette that indicates to me I am not inside human built space.

So, the like dumb antithesis of that for me becomes like landscape, you know, 'cause there are abstract painters who seem to me to be interested in what happens in a room or what happens in your- - [Amy] Absolutely.

- [Helen] In your body or what happens in your mind, right? Like, and that she does not appear to be that interested in any of that.

- [Amy] Definitely not. But I think it's, we would have to get into the conversation about how she works, which is partly from a far away distance to regard from far away from the other side of the room.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] And to look at it for a really long time, which is kind of like how you look at a lake.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] You know? - [Helen] Right. - [Amy] So, it's more about distance and immersion than landscape per se. - [Helen] Then landscape?

- [Amy] I don't know what you think. - [Erin] I think it's helpful to understand it in landscape in terms, well, at what she was looking at or what her sort of immediate direct experience was.

And I think of these later paintings as having more, you know, obviously the brushstrokes are much larger and I think they can be harder to appreciate because in a way there's not this sort of grandiosity of like the scale of brushstroke.

She's doing this two inch brush a lot, but she's spending so much time in the garden and she's very sad and alone when she's painting these.

I mean, she has people coming through the house, but I think of these as garden paintings.

And then when I get into that scale, I understand the way you're moving through the painting is the way she was kind of daily moving through her gardens.

- {Amy] You know, yeah. She lives in the country for some of the time, - [Helen] Right.

- [Amy] Which we don't all do. So, she's sensitized to the outdoor, but also she grew up by Lake Michigan.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] Which I did. And when you grow up by a Great lake, you also spend a lot of time like gazing out at a sort of watery thing.

Structure. - [Helen] And the horizon that is very different. - [Amy] Isn't really there.

- [Helen] Yeah. - [Amy] It keeps shifting color. And you could say that those things are sort of embedded in somebody's early consciousness.

Well, I mean, I think the more interesting question is, could she be this kind of painter without living in the countryside in France?

And could she be this kind of painter without living right next door to Monet or in his house.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] Or whatever it is. - [Helen] And then she obviously chose to live right next door to Monet and to live in the country.

- [Amy] And said it has nothing to do with him. - [Helen] Yes. - [Amy] So, you know, I know she hates this idea that she's like taking the baton from Mr. Monet and all the other grand old men,

but she takes it to another place. She actually pushes the ball further down the court and really outlines areas of like, where like we were talking about the verticality and the horizontality are working at an astonishing level that, I mean, she is taking art history further

than it was going to go, rather than interrupting it and just saying like, you know, let's critique the whole question of subjectivity.

She's like, what, how can I make it even more crucial? You know? So, she's doing amazing work as an artist where I still think you could say the project isn't a critical project, it's a conservative project in the sense

that we will keep what we had that was great and then see how far we can bring it.

- [Helen] It's also part of why it's not a critical project is because it is so invested in feeling.

- [Erin] Jenny Coulter has this great quote in her essay on poetry in the catalog and she's talking about Mitchell's early relationship to poetry and one quote from the book, she says that Mitchell treated poetry as if it was philosophy.

So sort of taking like, I think that there's that like hyper analytical looking at feeling that she's doing. - [Helen] Right.

- [Erin] Which is kind of a philosophy, but not in that like traditional Western sense.

- [Helen] That's a great segue to what we would do next, which is that we will look at the paintings as if they are philosophy and try and break down like what are the actual arguments she's making through this set of marks,

through this set of color, through these paintings themselves. - [Amy] Well, we can do that, but we have to also surpass the idea that it's an argument because that's also like a tradition.

- [Erin] Right, it's true. - [Amy] That's really surpassed here. - [Helen] That this isn't an argument.

- [Erin] Yeah, there's no argument. - [Amy] That this is not an academic project.

- [Helen] Right. - [Joan] This is a tree. I mean, my idea of a tree, which has nothing to do with a real tree, except to me it has to do with a real tree.

I think to copy a real tree would be absolutely impossible. - [Helen] I happen to love this painting.

- [Erin] Me too. - [Helen] And I thought it would be a really good painting to talk about what I call the competency.

Like what do you need to know in order to look at an abstract painting?

I thought maybe I would give like a first blush of like what I do and see.

The first thing I see in this picture is actually this sort of burnt reddish umbery marking because of the way it's positioned in the canvas in the top third and on a slight diagonal, I feel that it is meant to indicate movement.

The next thing that happened to me when I saw the picture was the drips.

So the drips, I have to say like I didn't realize how many of them there were at first.

Like the drips caught me off guard, they come up slower. And when I began to see all of them, two things happened almost it was like a gestalt.

Almost simultaneously in my brain. I realized, oh they shimmer like rain and damn this painting is happening fast.

Like all of a sudden I feel the drips indicate to me there's a kind of velocity.

I'm curious if that way of thinking about how to enter the picture, like how it resonates with you and how you come at it similarly or differently.

- [Erin] You go first. - [Amy] Well, I mean this is how you do a crit in art...

...school. - [Helen] Mm-hm. - [Amy] You know? - [Helen] Yeah. - [Amy] You literally, everybody says what they're seeing.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] That's what you do. And then with that material you can start having a language.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] So, I think everyone should do the reading you... ...just did.

- [Helen] I would love that. - [Amy] So I think for me, I don't read speed in the drips.

I read liquidity. It's not how fast you paint, it's how thin your paint is.

Probably sometimes she throws paintings out 'cause the drips are annoying her. - [Erin] I don't think I go in via individual marks.

Like my eye initially moves around pretty fast. So, I think I'm taking in the overall composition.

So, my entry point would be blue cloud and then moving up to the orange and then brought back down by the orange and then sort of delineating maybe this foreground and then start like really looking hard.

- [Helen] And what does looking hard mean? Like what does that mean? - [Erin] Like getting up close to the painting.

- [Helen] Okay, and doing what? - [Erin] Looking at the striations in color. Like look at how many different blues are in here.

- [Helen] Right. - [Erin] And then how many different colors does she have on the brush when she's making a mark?

And then start to notice like what she's laid down before she lays this down, which is that pink and lilac.

And then I think I'm looking at the background layer then. - [Amy] Yeah. - [Erin] Once we get to this sort of like purple and I'm looking like at the, I mean to me the harder you look, then you start seeing like the complexity

of how much she's laid down. - [Helen] Right. - [Erin] Without letting you lose track of these relation...

...ships that she's making and then putting the drips on top of it. ...top of it.

- [Amy] I have a question. - [Erin] Uh-huh? - [Amy] Does she get on a ladder? - [Erin] Yes.

- [Helen] She is on a ladder, okay. - [Erin] So this, she's on a ladder.

- [Amy] All right. - [Erin] So, the other thing that like we both agree is super important when looking at a Joan Mitchell is to like back up. - [Helen] Back up.

- [Helen] Right, because she herself. - [Amy] Backs up. - [Helen] Is always backing up. - [Erin] Yeah.

- [Helen] In a way, that if we recall, Pollock doesn't ...back up. - [Erin] Right.

- [Helen] Polluck. - [Amy] He's in it. - [Helen] He's in it and he stays in it...

the whole time. - [Amy] And it's on the floor. - [Helen] Right. - [Amy] So, there's not going to be drips.

- [Helen] There's not even really a back up. - [Amy] and there's also a tremendous resistance.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] There can be drawing. - [Helen] Right. - [Erin] Yeah.

- [Helen] When you step back, talk about squinting, I mean if you squinted, like I could lay 25 very famous 19th century paintings over the composition of this painting.

- [Amy] Right. - [Helen] But the minute you get up close, then of course it feels like improv.

But here it feels like almost atavistic. Like she's got a deep sense of renaissance, perspectival, pictorial space.

- [Erin] I think it's also by this time she's older and she knows color ratios and like you were saying earlier, she knows certain depths just in her.

- [Amy] And weights. - [Erin] And weights. - [Helen] Right. - [Amy] Yeah. - [Amy] But, I think it's very awkward and really weird and uncomfortable and ungainly.

I don't- - [Helen] This painting? - [Amy] Yeah, I don't think it's classical at all.

I feel like the whole painting is like the number five where you have one part, second part, third part, fourth part, and fifth part.

- [Helen] Uh-huh. - [Amy] And so the painting is not at all composed as more of, it's more deployed and it's like about ratios and zones of like deployment.

I guess I say it because I wonder about improv as a counterpoint to the idea of composition.

- [Helen] Right, Right. - [Amy] And I feel like there's a lot of that.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] And that's where radicality can occur, where you're like, okay, you're not a radical with a sign, you know, saying fuck the government.

- [Helen] Right, right, right. - [Amy] But you're definitely messing around with what's supposed to be classical and you're definitely proposing systems that are counterintuitive, irrational, and they create difficulty.

- [Helen] But, there's always a sense of balance. I never feel torqued. - [Erin] Yes.

- [Helen] Right? - [Erin] She always wanted to keep the plumb line of a dancer.

- [Helen] Right. - [Erin] In her. - [Amy] Right. - [Erin] Every composition. - Yeah. - [Amy] It's very, that's where it's both vertical and horizontal.

- [Erin] Yes. - [Helen] We've got to lay down now that she was a figure...

...skater. - [Erin] Yes. - [Amy] Yeah. - [Erin] And a dancer. - [Helen] She's vertical, horizontal.

- [Amy] She's an athlete. - [Helen] She's an athlete. - [Helen] She understands how her body moves in space.

- [Amy] Yeah. - [Helen] Right. - [Amy] But that's I think part of what I'm calling instinct and improvisation.

You know, you get lucky strokes and you get unlucky strokes and you have to paint the unlucky ones out.

- [Erin] And that's what's so fun about looking at it, ...right? - [Amy] Yeah. - [Erin] Like that, I mean, to me that's the sort of wonder of what part of it was an accident, to your point.

And like, how does someone know how to do make this? - [Helen] Right. - [Erin] And how do you know when to stop?

- [Helen] So, can I ask you the plaintiff question then, because I've been looking at the picture now for quite a while and had not registered the three different greens.

Why does she use those three different colors? But even more what I want to know, is what do you think it means?

Like if what we're talking about is how do we look at an abstract painting?

So here we are, we've gotten to this moment. What does it mean? - [Amy] Well, that's what a poem is.

That's what language is. That's why you would struggle to find the exact right word.

When you first make your first draft and you're like, "I don't like the word indeterminacy, I think I'll use nuance." It's got to look good.

So, she's got this emerald that's hidden in the hole. That's popping up behind this dark earthy thing that relates to the brown almost.

- [Erin] Right. - [Amy] And then there's this very gentle kind of mossy and I find extremely beautiful.

- [Erin] Yes. - [Amy] Kind of mark making at the bottom that is literally not impatient, but not too big to have like left like drips and all kinds of pizzazz, it doesn't have any- - [Erin] Pizzazz. - [Amy] Yeah.

- [Amy] It doesn't have show on it. - [Helen] It's not showing. - [Amy] But it's a very, very beautiful little construction of drawing.

I think of it as all drawing. - [Helen] Right. - [Amy] 'Cause it's like, it's how she gets space.

And so, it just allows you to have this physical sense of pleasure where you can almost feel your body going behind the thing.

- [Erin] Mm-hm. - [Amy] You know, they always used to say like, what's the picture plane? - [Erin] Right.

- [Amy] You know, at art school, and the picture plane was described to me as like, if you put how a screen door is in a doorway, it's a thing that both registers the doorway itself and it's dimensions and it's reality and it's flatness.

But you can totally go through it. - [Helen] Go through it. - [Erin] Right.

- [Helen] Right. (light music) - [Helen] So, how would you start, Amy, with this picture?

Where would you begin? - [Amy] To look at it? Like where does my eye enter?

- [Helen] Yeah. - [Amy] Wow. The thing I love about this painting, much more to my taste than the painting that we just talked about, is that it has a couple of those standout moments like particularly the purple verticals,

the weird emerald green, you know, leftover stuff and the dark purple, dark orange, weird dense blue, crazy marigold yellow.

It's like there's so much going on, but it's all happening as if it's behind this sort of scrim that's getting denser as it goes to the right.

And so unlike the other one, there's not a part to whole ratio to me.

I sort of encounter it as like this absolute field. There's tons of drips and there's this open space where it should be falling down into that space, but I feel literally nothing but this uprising.

- [Helen] Yeah. - [Amy] You know, kind of sense of ascendant density. This is formal work to me in the sense, not in the sense of formalism or formal as opposed to casual, but this is form-based art where every kind of feeling

and movement and responsive kind of part of my body as it beholds it, is responding not to narrative, not to content per se, but there's just this presence almost like exuding out of this object that has every kind of part of your emotional

and intellectual experience as being a human being that's crammed into its own language. And it's just literally, it sounds so corny to say it, but like the form is the content.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] And there is no other content except about the... ...kind of, not just emotional aspect of being alive, but just the fullness of perception.

- [Helen] No, it doesn't sound corny. I actually agree with you. Like, I don't have any of my like kind of landscape moment, does not happen here. - [Amy] Oh, you don't?

Oh okay. - [Helen] Not at all. In fact, there's a metronome happening for me in this painting and it's like it happens down, you know, boom boom, boom, boom. - [Amy] Right.

- [Helen] And then it goes boom, boom, boom, boom, boom boom boom boom. Almost like there's a conductor like quality in front of an orchestra and here is like, oh yeah, sometimes the tempo of your life is not one, two, one, two, three,

it's all at once-ness that happens here. - [Amy] Right. - [Amy] You know, like I don't, or excess.

- [Helen] Oh well, it's totally excessive and then it's excessiveness and it's metronomic-ness. What I get to it, for my corny moment, is this is joy, which could be the sunflower, the hummingbird, those ineffable moments that cannot be pinned down.

- [Erin] Hm. - [Amy] Do you have a read? - [Erin] I feel the landscape vibe in this one, but yes, I think that it feels like music as well.

She named it for music. - [Helen] Right. - [Erin] But for improvisational music. And she was interested more in like the colorist version of experimental music.

So, less about that compositional structure and more about the nuance of sound. - [Helen] Right. - [Erin] And the sort of range of sounds and that feels fitting here.

And she was looking at a lot of lilacs at this time. She notes that in her letters that she was really sad.

There were a lot of deaths happening in her life. Longstanding friends and her sister.

And that this period she does this inward turn towards looking at her garden and she was planting a lot of lilacs.

- [Helen] All right, so I wanted to end with this painting. Which, when I first saw it gave me like really, really major Cezanne vibes.

It's not Mont Sainte-Victoire, it's not that version of Cezanne, but it's more the bathers in the landscape version of Cezanne.

And there's a big empty space and there are two empty spaces. There's the kind of trees and then a meadow, and then the figures are forming like these parentheses around this empty space. - [Amy] Oh yeah.

- [Helen] And I think it's partly because Cezanne knows the gig is up, like to put like nude figures in a landscape at the beginning of the 20th century.

It's like it doesn't make any- - [Erin] Right. - [Amy] It has ceased to make sense.

- [Helen] It has ceased to make sense. - [Amy] Yeah. - [Helen] And yet somehow he is still struggling to make a landscape that has like literal figure ground, but he's also playing with a kind of emptiness in the middle.

And so what I see here, - [Amy] Yeah. - [Helen] is a four-part painting that is fundamentally structured by the grammatical mark of the parenthesis.

- [Amy] Right. - [Helen] Right. So, purple pulls you into a pictorial depth. The yellow makes you stay right on the surface of the picture and kind of careens up.

And even though she's got that little margin on that one, she doesn't have it there.

So, to me it feels like the energy is actually leaving the painting, which is not something I think she normally does.

Even these strokes are so much bigger and longer. - [Amy] Yeah. - [Helen] Than the short stroke there.

Like this is very, she has to move her whole body in order to get this kind of stroke.

And yet she's got to like, mm, hold that in. And I see her as playing with like this tension between language, painting as a language, and marks behaving like marks in language do.

And then all of this just excess. Like that she's got more of something than she knows what to do with.

- [Amy] Yeah, totally. I mean I think the best reading of this painting exactly like as you said is parenthetical.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] And that like, it's therefore related to writing on a page.

And she's always done by this point so many of those charcoal or pastel poem drawings where she does then feed the drawing paper into a old-fashioned typewriter and types it out.

- [Helen] Right. - [Amy] So, she's a really aware of the typewriter font in relation to her drawing and I just feel like this is a font almost.

- [Helen] Right. - [Erin] See, I think of it as the opposite of that because of the title.

- [Amy] What's the title? - [Helen] What's the title? - [Erin] Chez ma sœur.

- [Amy] Oh, this is the sister. - [Helen] Her sisters house. - [Erin] This is right after her sister died.

- [Amy] Right. - [Erin] So, one way maybe to read it in terms of like a feeling would be that she is putting parentheses around something that she just, is this chaotic for her?

- [Helen] Right. - [Erin] I like the idea of her getting it. She had such a hard time painting at this moment that she was just sort of getting it down.

- [Helen] Wow. - [Erin] You know? And I think maybe you're right, like there's more vulnerability in the way she's not hiding the brushstrokes.

Like we talk about how much she, I mean what a wizard she is at sort of hiding the mark making, where things start and end.

And here you just, it's very, it is really unusual. - [Helen] Mm-hm. - [Amy] I mean it literally looks like finger painting.

- [Erin] Yeah, exactly. - [Amy] Yes. And so, I think there's like this desperate quality of this kind of in the dark, you know, kind of going.

- [Helen] And there's a way in which when we do talk about abstraction, even in its most resolutely formal terms.

- [Amy] Right. - [Helen] I think we are often also talking about who the...

...person is, and what the picture is about in a different register. - [Amy] Well she is, you know, if you think of a sibling, you think of sibling rivalry.

And she's sort of dealing with like the sibling rivalry that she has with the great painters that came before her.

- [Helen] Right, right. - [Amy] And she's sort of rejecting that rivalry and yet it's almost like by rejecting it, you're sort of re-inscribing it, you know?

And so, it's not like she's ignoring it. There's always something that could partly explain like the relevance of something when people like can see it again.

And I think like it's her sort of contingent relations that are kind of, she fights, she doesn't really accept.

I mean, and in the painting itself. - [Helen] Right. - [Amy] You know, she brackets.

- [Helen] Yep. - [Amy] But she doesn't reject. - [Helen] Right. - [Amy] I mean there's a mediation in all these paintings.

- [Helen] I'm incredibly glad that both of you came today and that we were able to talk this long.

It's actually kind of rare. I really, really appreciate it. Thank you both. - [Erin] Now I'm nervous.

I am 99% sure that's the title of this painting. - [Amy] If it's not, we can always put a subtitle.

Got it wrong. - [Erin] There is one similar. (light music) - [Joan] I can't quote Van Gogh, but it's in one letter he wrote about one of his so many beautiful letters where he says he gives gratitude to the sunflower because it exists.

And I give gratitude to trees cause they exist, or to, and that's all what my opinion is.

(birds chirping)