“Trees that protect me from the rain.
Trees that refuse to be in another’s landscape, mine or yours.
Trees that are there to reassure you are here.
Trees that are an internal presence of being
Between places, here and there.”
Phong Bui
Joan Mitchell created prints in the late 1950s with the assistance of Floriano Vecchi, the owner of Tiber Press in New York. Following this stint, she later returned to the art of print making in 1972, creating etchings of her admired sunflower forms and continued with print making throughout the 1970s and 80s. The present lot, Tree 1, comes from her final body of prints which she produced with Ken Tyler at his workshop in Mt. Kisco, New York. For this last series she focuses on her beloved and iconic Trees and Sunflowers. The tree, for Joan, has remained an important compositional focus of her artworks including her earlier 1960s cypress series and her paintings of the mid 1970s which often allude to a solemn tree within a vast landscape.