Dancing Through Fields of Color
The Story of Helen Frankenthaler
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Author Elizabeth Brown and illustrator Aimee Sicuro’s picture book Dancing Through Fields of Color:The Story of Helen Frankenthaler is a biography about the artist’s breakthrough into the art world.
They said only men could paint powerful pictures, but Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) splashed her way through the modern art world. Channeling deep emotion, she poured paint onto her canvas and danced with the colors to make art unlike anything anyone had ever seen. She used unique tools like mops and squeegees to push the paint around, to dazzling effects. Frankenthaler became an originator of the influential “Color Field” style of abstract expressionist painting with her “soak stain” technique, and her artwork continues to electrify new generations of artists today.
Dancing Through Fields of Color discusses Frankenthaler’s early life, how she used colors to express emotion, and how she overcame the male-dominated art world of the 1950s.
“A pitch-perfect expression of a little-known artist in text and illustration alike, this is a top-notch example of the picture book biography.” —School Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a child, Helen Frankenthaler, an Abstract Expressionist who created the Color Field painting movement, shirked rules in favor of free expression. "Instead of going to bed, Helen filled the sink with water. She dribbled in drops of ruby red nail polish and watched the color flow." With sweeping strokes, Sicuro conveys the young artist's joy in the act of creation, her images of seaside landscapes spilling off the canvasses, and waves trailing from the beach she's painting into her bedroom. Following her father's death when she was 11, "her canvases remained blank, her world of colors and light...dark," Frankenthaler attends art school, where she adheres to rigid expectations. But the work of Jackson Pollock reawakens her, liberating her to paint emotively. Back matter provides biographical content, insight into Frankenthaler's creative process, and an art activity. Ages 4 8.
