Helen Frankenthaler-COLOR FILED VIDEO

Helen Frankenthaler(born December 12, 1928) is an American post-painterly abstraction artist. Born in New York City, she was influenced by Jackson Pollock's paintings and by Clement Greenberg. She was the youngest daughter of a justice on the New York State Supreme Court. She studied at the Dalton School under Rufino Tamayo and also at Bennington College in Vermont. She later married fellow artist Robert Motherwell.
Style and technique
Her career was launched in 1952 with the exhibition of Mountains and Sea. This painting is large - measuring seven feet by ten feet - and has the effect of a watercolor, though it is painted in oils. In it, she introduced the technique of painting directly on to an unprepared canvas so that the material absorbs the colors. She heavily diluted the oil paint with turpentine or kerosene so that the color would soak into the canvas. This technique, known as "soak stain" was adopted by other artists (notably Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland) and launched the second generation of the Color Field school of painting. This method would leave the canvas with a halo effect around each area to which the paint was applied.
soak-stain technique.
A prolific painter and printmaker, Helen Frankenthaler is known for pioneering the "soak-stain" technique in painting. Drawing inspiration from the free-flowing paint of Jackson Pollock's black-and-white canvases of 1951, Frankenthaler began applying thinned color pigment directly onto unprimed canvases. Her resulting abstract paintings had a liquid appearance devoid of any tangible pigment, much like a watercolor, but more luminous and on a larger scale. In 1953, art critic Clement Greenberg introduced painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland to Frankenthaler's canvases. The two Washington, D.C.–based painters were so exhilarated by what they saw in her New York studio that they returned to Washington and immediately began to experiment with the soak-stain technique.