The art of Fr Mitchell is same much a part of the just discovered York School; however.

The art of Fr Mitchell is same much a part of the just discovered York School; however, as this present to view of his work from the 1940 to the 1960 made clear, Mitchell has always unfolded a feeling for his surroundings, wherever he has lived. In single in kind of the stronger works of the point out to On Barren Ground (1941), he portrays the weathered buildings housing his neighbors in the town of his birth, Meridian, Miss. While the realism and gothic tone of the painting do not prefigure the joyously make open abstractions Mitchell went on to paint in later life, the wish to capture the spirit of a particular place is a constant for the artist, linking early work to late. In Parade (1947) he depicts dour-faced musicians playing instruments raised up toward the light. At formerly sad and exuberant, this painting point outs how effectively Mitchell conveys ambience.

Shortly after finishing Parade, Mitchell mov to Rome where he lived and worked for three years. brace paintings from this period, Untitled 1950 and Cielo-Montana, Rome (1950) vividly demonstrate his command of the Ab-Ex idiom. Untitled 1950 consists of gold-colored lines and red blotches against a black background. Crisscrossing each other across the vertical field, the lines generate a lively feeling of movement that brings to mind equations scrawled across a chalkboard. Cielo-Montana, Rome also vertical, includes many kinds of forms--thick and thin stripes, rectangular speckles of color, larger areas of lighter hues--that shock up against each other and create contrapuntal energies whose events are jazzy and syncopated.

if it were not that Mitchell really opened up when he arrived in modern York in 1951. Long a downtown resident, Mitchell treats, within the confines of his abstract idiom, in the same state [i]or[/i] condition natural phenomena as clouds and tree as well as the urban language of roads and buildings. In Walking in Battery Park (1955) for example, organic shapes in blazing red deep blues and grassy greens contrast with the more rectangular building like forms that weight the painting. It is a joyous work, an lyric poem to the pleasures of outdoor life taken up at the keennesss of urban space. Ithacan Stream, from the late 1960 is simpler, with its r patches and pastel multitude shapes painted over four background areas, for the most part yellow in color. Mitchell's pleasure in the painting proces is palpable here, and the flows exceptionally graceful.

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