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August, 2022 finds me a couple of weeks shy of the end of another season in my home-based studio and gallery. I’ve been busy this summer: At month’s end I’ll return to Grand Rapids where at the beginning of June I installed in a large church 30 paintings in a show I called “Emerging Joy: Paintings from the Inside-Out.” I’ve just received an email informing me the four paintings that have been hanging in the American Embassy in Bratislava, Slovakia as part of the Art in Embassies Program for the past 2 ½ years are headed home and I need to make room for them. My annual open house with food, live music, and many paintings is just around the corner. As always, I have 3 or 4 paintings in progress.

With much to do, I’m vaguely aware the Joan Mitchell Retrospective exhibit that’s been traveling the country is at its last stop at the Baltimore Museum of Art and will close in few days. I’ve already looked at flights and hotels several times and I do so once more before finally realizing I won’t be going. There’s a lot going on in my own art world; I don’t have the time or the energy. And, besides, Baltimore in August? I won’t go.

Why all this interest in Joan (not Joni) Mitchell? I had first encountered her work in 2012. The instructor of a gouache painting workshop in which I was enrolled used pictures of Mitchell’s work to illustrate a point about abstraction. Looking at these images, I was attracted but wasn’t sure why. I did love how she used color, but I was not interested in abstraction—I was happy and commercially successful as an outdoor painter of northern Michigan landscapes. I bought The Paintings of Joan Mitchell anyway and, puzzling over it, from time to time would see if my brush could or would make paintings like Mitchell’s.

Then, in 2016-17, Women of Abstract Expressionism toured the U.S. and I went to see it at Charlotte’s Mint Museum. Until then I’d seen only one of Mitchell’s paintings in person—at the Art Institute of Chicago—but here there were at least three of hers alongside 50 or so other monumental works by the likes of Helen Frankenthaler, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Lee Krasner and others. The size and uniqueness of their art seem to invite me to take up space in the world and make my marks there. I’d not felt that kind of permission before.

While I appreciated many of the paintings by these Ninth Street Women, I was most drawn to Joan Mitchell and her bold, colorful abstract landscapes. My own gestural brushstrokes seemed to resonate with hers. I related to her “rage to paint” especially as the November, 2016 U.S. Presidential election yielded a result that terrified and angered me. Empowered by how Mitchell brought her strong emotions to the canvas, I let go of my practice of making popular outer-referenced paintings in favor of more raw expression.

Abandoning the Impressionist color palette I’d used since I’d started painting almost 20 years before, I bought my first black paint. I squeezed the pigment directly onto the canvas; I picked up and used other tubes of paint without looking to see the color. Using loud music to inspire the brush or squeegee to move more freely, I spattered and dripped, surrendering to what seemed to be powerful impulses that wanted a large canvas to receive them. Soon, my intuitive, Rorschach-like mark-making began to reveal shapes resembling birds and, once birds flew onto my canvas, they dominated my art.

In 2018, I conceived of an expansive multimedia, migration-inspired, avian-themed installation called BIRDS FLY IN: A Human Refuge. Having commissioned music from a young Mexican composer/violinist, I created 20 large scale painting to be displayed on a cage formed of chain link fence designed to evoke children in cages at the U.S./Mexican border. Scheduled to debut in 2020, the timing coincided with Covid; nevertheless, the project was installed twice. At our local art center it broke all previous attendance records with 1500 visitors; the following year, at the Dennos Museum in Traverse City, another five or six thousand visited. During each installation I would learn that the installation brought people to tears; the words used most frequently to describe it: “moving and powerful.”

When the exhibit came down from the museum in early January, 2021 I still had high hopes for the project; yet with what seemed like many good possibilities, by August, 2022, none had materialized. With so many testifying to the project’s power, not to mention professional video documentation and a beautiful exhibition catalog, I couldn’t understand why BIRDS hadn’t taken flight. I’d been living and breathing the project for the better part of 4 years and wondered if I’d been naïve to have expected otherwise. Well-intentioned friends suggested that I should feel gratified by the response the project had received; however, with the exhibit locked up in a storage unit, I was more demoralized than grateful.

To add to my glumness, a few days before the Joan Mitchell Retrospective was due to close, an artist I know from social media, posted on Instagram a photo of herself standing next to one Mitchell’s big paintings. She wrote: “Just back from Baltimore after seeing the Joan Mitchell Exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Amazingly beautiful and impactful.”

Overcome with envy, I kicked myself for not having gone. I could now see that my excuses—each eminently justifiable—didn’t add up as good enough reasons for denying myself an experience that I truly wanted. Not only that, it could have been an experience that, like the Women in Abstract Expression show, would move me out of the slough of despond in which I’d been wallowing for the better part of a year.

As I continued mindlessly scrolling through postings, another image of a Mitchell painting caught my eye. There in a post by the Joan Mitchell Foundation, I see: “The Retrospective exhibit is headed to Paris where it will be paired with another exhibit Monet-Mitchell: Dialogue. The showing at Fondation Louis Vuitton, which is the final venue in the exhibition's tour, will be the most significant Mitchell exhibition in Europe in almost 30 years, creating an opportunity for the public in France and Europe to be immersed in Mitchell's work.”

Immediately I realize I won’t let myself miss this opportunity see the Joan Mitchell Retrospective with the bonus Monet-Mitchell show. I read the rest of the notice and a plan for an art pilgrimage falls into place: “Monet - Mitchell presents each artist’s unique response to a shared landscape in the French countryside northwest of Paris, which they interpret in a particularly immersive and sensual manner.” Not only do I want to experience the exhibits in Paris, I want to experience their shared landscape myself.

An idea takes hold: My husband Roo (who loves France and speaks the language) is game and together we plot an itinerary that meanders with the River Seine to the Normandy coast. We’ll stay in Paris for a few days, then we’ll rent a car and drive to Giverny, Vétheuil, Rouen, Etretat, Honfleur, places known to me only from the titles of Monet’s paintings. Then we’ll return to Paris for a second visit to Monet and Mitchell at Fdn. Louis Vuitton.

As a pilgrim on this chemin des artistes, I intend to consider what insights Monet and Mitchell might reveal to me on these topics: What does it mean to be a Real Artist? What exactly is the job description? How does one find an original voice? And, with my mind still bothered by my stalled BIRDS FLY IN project, I would also seek to know What’s it all about, anyway?

As I’m about to embark on this quest, I tuck into my suitcase a small kit with small tubes of gouache, a set of ink sticks, a few brushes, and some small pieces of watercolor paper. I have no sense that I’ll want to paint in France—I’ve let myself off the hook in advance--but if I do want to paint something, I’ll be prepared. I arrive in Paris, weary and jet-lagged, yet quietly expectant that more will be revealed.