Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), became active in the New York School of the 1950s, initially influenced by artists like Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. She gained fame with her invention of the colour-stain technique—applying thin washes of paint to unprimed canvas—in her iconic Mountains and Sea (1952). This was a motivating work for Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and other Colour Field Painters who emerged in the 1960s. Her own canvases often evoked elements of landscape or figuration in the shaping of their forms. “My pictures are full of climates, abstract climates,” she once said. “They're not nature per se, but a feeling.”
