Fall Up to Autumn - with Art Essay

Fall Up to Autumn

painted September 10, 2025, 14" x 11" (w x h), using Daniel Smith, Schmincke Horadam, and Winsor & Newton watercolors, all selected for light fastness and permanence, and Uniball waterproof fade proof ink on 140 lbs. Fabriano Artistico cold press rough 100% cotton extra white watercolor paper, framed.

$900

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Color and Line Art Essay

I discovered a fascinating contrast in how I panted Fall Up to Autumn and Helen Frankenthaler painted Sesame, both of us documenting our approach and execution.

How I painted Fall Up to Autumn:

I'd painted a similar loose foliage scene seven year ago. Now, I painted many sketches, looser and looser, discovering what worked and where I was going.

I began this final painting, while visualizing where I was going with this art, familiar with the many times I've observed the fall foliage in the back fields behind my home. I freely stroked free lines using my permanent ink Uniball pen, my skeleton to build on.

Using flat brushes for sharp edges, I panted light to dark, dashed on yellow for foliage. With it still wet I lightly dabbed bits of orange in it to give the yellow mass some depth. I let this dry, contemplating the next bright color. And I laid down some tan and yellow in the foreground. Once dry, I laid on orange, let it dry, and then red. For a darker foreground, to make the greens, I used two blues, I laid them down in the foreground over the yellows, waiting for each to dry. I lifted sections with the edge of my flat brush for depth. Finally, I'd planned for a dark center foreground and laid down layers of French Ultramarine Blue.

In Common and Not

I lay down my line first, her later. We both keep our colors direct and focused, using the same colors.

Sesame
Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), American
Acrylic on canvas, 6' 10" x 8' 10" / 83" x 106" (w x h), 1970
Private Collection

Helen Frankenthaler: a paintings retrospective
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas
November 5, 1989 - January 7, 1990

Text Sources: Artsy, Helen Frankenthaler: A Paintings Retrospective, Wiki, edited
Regarding the fine lines in Sesame, "I was going to Morocco," says Frankenthaler, "and as an artist you think of the visits Matisse and Delacroix had made there. In art and decoration, I knew iconography was forbidden by religion. Linear or arabesque motifs were used to replace and rival imagery - on walls, reliefs, tiles, gates, railings - an ordered melange of patterns." The line in Sesame reasserts itself in a manner rarely seen in her art. In Sesame "I put in the colors first. Once the painting was dry and placed against the wall, I put in the lines with a felt-tip pen. I later went over the lines in paint using a fine brush." The picture went through a process of many additions and was "worked on both on the floor and the wall," she notes. "However, all paintings must be judged on the wall."

Sesame marked the start of new considerations that would inform much of Frankenthaler's painting over the next few years. She points to the four different compositional "placements" of the painting: its overall flatness, the play of the left side versus the right side, the interior of the white crossing passage, what she refers to as a "cable or crevice " and the drawn lines, about whose space making she observes, "I was very conscious of threading line through the cable/crevice."

The title Sesame carries a double reference: one is to the ocher color of sesame seeds, not unlike the way in which Tangerine refers to the orange of the fruit, while the other is to the magical command first given by Ali Baba, "Open, sesame," used here, as Frankenthaler states, "because the picture is open."

This 1990 exhibit organized by E.A. Carmean, Jr., Director, the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, first opened at the MOMA in New York, traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas, then to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and finally the Detroit Institute of Arts. It featured forty of her most important canvases and was her first painting retrospective since 1969.

Helen Frankenthaler:
a paintings retrospective
E.A. Carmean, Jr., 1989, Abrams, New York
In association with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Helen Frankenthaler working on
an abstract expressionist painting
in her New York City studio circa 1957-1960,
photo by Burt Glinn

Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), born in Manhattan, was an American abstract expressionist painter. She was a major contributor to the history of postwar American painting. She exhibited her art from the early 1950s until 2011, over six decades spanning several generations of abstract painters, while continuing to paint vital and ever-changing new work. Frankenthaler began exhibiting her large-scale abstract expressionist paintings in contemporary museums and galleries in the early 1950s. She was included in the 1964 Post-Painterly Abstraction exhibition that came to be known as color field. Her work has been the subject of several retrospective exhibitions, including a 1989 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and has been exhibited worldwide since the 1950s.

Helen Frankenthaler working on
an another abstract expressionist painting
in her New York City studio, circa 1957-1960,
photo by Burt Glinn

In 2001, Helen Frankenthaler was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In addition to her paintings, Frankenthaler also made ceramics and steel sculptures and maintained an extensive printmaking practice. Her highest price painting sold is for Royal Fireworks, $7,895,300 USD at Sotheby's in 2020. Sotheby's has sold 16 more of her paintings from $1,000,000 USD to $5,894,100 USD. See Royal Fireworks on Sotheby's HERE.