Adversary Cowlick

I need this neon sign in my kitchen!

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And an unfortunate segue here, because I am going to talk about Helen Frankenthaler who died at the end of December at the age of 83.  Back when I was in college she was one of the very few woman painters whose name was immediately recognized with the 'big guys' of abstract expressionism, and she had earned her reputation in just a few short years of painting.  She had developed a method unseen before of 'staining' her unprimed canvasses with diluted paints.  In the early 50's she added turpentine to oil paints but soon turned to the 'new' acrylics that had just been developed for the clear bright colors and ease of use.

Early 50's photo of Frankenthaler at work pouring thinned paint on a canvas.  

Like Pollock, she preferred to work on the floor.

 This immediately made the viewer a part of the painting, one would simply be pulled right in because of the translucency and brushwork.  She was aligned with the Abstract Expressionists of the early 1950's and was influenced by Color Field artists like deKooning, Krasner, Pollock, and Kline.  Her work in turn influenced Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis

Small's Paradise, 1967

Morris Louis stated that Frankenthaler was a "bridge between Pollock and what was possible."  

The Smithsonian has a collection of 16 of her works online here including early works with oils, and a later switch to acrylics and lithography.  In her later years she also worked with sculpture

"Every so often every artist feels, 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985, I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away."  Helen Frankenthaler 1928-2011