Blue Territory: A Meditation on the Life and Art of Joan Mitchell

Robin Lippincott is the author of The Real, True Angel, a collection of stories, and Mr. Dalloway, a novel. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the American Voice, the Literary Review, and many other magazines. He teaches in the MFA writing program at Spalding University.

"Robin Lippincott's affecting and intimate tribute to the painter, Joan Mitchell, is as fiercely felt, imaginative, fluid, and light-filled as her brushstrokes. He has erased the boundaries between Mitchell's art and her life, capturing the quality of light, the saturation of color in her work as deftly as her originality, loneliness, and intensity. Blue Territory will open your eyes to the work of one remarkable artist, and to what art at its best can do." - Eleanor Morse, Author, White Dog Fell from the Sky "The title speaks to it...blue is her color. Blue is Joan Mitchell. This book evokes her spirit through a serious of carefully chosen quotes and poignant ruminations. [It is] a biography that is elegantly written and more than a meditation. It's glorious." - Alex Nyerges, Director, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts "In Blue Territory, Robin Lippincott assembles and unfolds the facts, events, and relationships of Joan Mitchell's life, poetically constructing a portrait of this important painter. Joan loved her life as an artist - it was one full of risks, high and low points, of art to make and see, and artists, poets, writers and composers to meet. She was an intellectual, a fighter, a person of integrity; full of empathy, love, and anguish. Through all of her travails, she painted - from late at night until early in the morning. With this beautiful book, which is at once specific and insightful, oblique and haunting, Lippincott conveys a sense of who Joan Mitchell was, and the substance of her work." - Sally Apfelbaum, Artist, friend of Joan Mitchell "Robin Lippincott has an uncanny ability to convey just what he finds so compelling about Joan Mitchell-from her gutsy struggle to thrive in the male-dominated art world of the '50s and '60s, to her last valiant efforts to work while dying of lung cancer. Combining personal essay, biography, and a dash of fiction, Blue Territory freely imagines the artist's interiority and boldly celebrates her life, hitting on deeper truths regarding artistic endeavor, the art of living, and the equally creative act of fandom." - Clifford Chase, Author, The Tooth Fairy and Winkie "No mere recounting of the life of an artistic figure, Blue Territory is an audacious rendering of an artist, her passion, her obstacles, and her triumphant work. Robin Lippincott has created a genre of his own in this revelation of Joan Mitchell and her world. Here, the abstract nature of her painting is made concrete, the metaphysics of her vision made tangible, and her vibrant color finds its perfect translation in equally vivid prose. The reader comes away from the experience with the impression of having inhabited, in deep empathetic understanding, a life made from art." - Kirby Gann, Author, Ghosting and Our Napoleon in Rags