I saw Edrita Fried seven years ago, and of course, at the time I did not know of Edrita Fried or what she was like as a person — not to mention what she was like as a psychoanalyst, or how she seemed to Mitchell in their sessions, sessions a psychoanalyst might show up to as less than a whole person. Rachel Cohen notes in The Yale Review that at a certain point in her life, Joan was seeing Dr. Fried frequently, “five times a week.” Edrita Fried was painted the same year that Fried died of illness, in 1981.

It wasn’t until her 50s that Mitchell began talking more about her synesthesia and eideticism with the people in her life, such as her analyst Edrita Fried. Maybe this was because she wasn’t particularly bothered by her perceptual differences, or was unsure of whether what she was experiencing was anything more than a figment of her imagination. Albers writes about what Mitchell said in her sessions with Fried: “Flushing out her demons, Joan told Fried about her ‘wrong’ perceptions: colored letters, colored music, colored emotions, colored personalities, boundary deficits, too-insistent memories and dreams.”1

Hearing a particular word or phrase spoken or read, Mitchell might imagine an image projected in her “mind’s eye” in unusually accurate and vivid detail. This perceptual phenomenon is not infrequently experienced by younger children, but as the child ages it usually disappears. However, some adults never lose the eidetic memory they possessed as children and might suddenly become aware of it later in their lives — as was the case with Joan Mitchell.

Mitchell had personality-color synesthesia, which means that encountering a specific person, or a memory of that person, might bring to mind a picture Mitchell envisioned along with colors she associated with them, various in hue and overlapping. The images Mitchell saw might automatically trigger an association with their corresponding color.

Edrita Fried is a painting like a brain in two parts. I envision Joan Mitchell’s two-paneled canvases as two hemispheres of the brain, where one part corresponds to what she thinks the painting is about and the other half corresponds to what the colors in the painting signify. For example, in Wood, Wind, No Tuba (1979), the orange symbolizes the winds and the blue symbolizes the wood. I think this because the sound the wind instruments produce is much higher than that of the woods, which is lower or at least contains deeper tones.

In Merci, as in other two-paneled diptychs Mitchell created over her lifetime, she translated the images that words like merci conjured in her mind when she heard them, and used these images to create her paintings, which I imagine to be visual representations of the words those sounds made. Mitchell incorporated into her paintings her unique way of viewing the world, which she often described as “carrying around a suitcase of pictures.” Mitchell seems to get a dreamy and far-away look when she looks at her paintings, and talks about them with the attitude of a vaguely dissatisfied lover. 


 

In a video filmed at Mitchell’s studio in Vétheuil, Mitchell brings out one of her diptych paintings and discusses its story for the camera: