Emerging from the artist's series called The Black Paintings, this work is prototypical of Mitchell's output in the mid-sixties, which merges European landscape painting with American Abstract Expressionism. In UNTITLED  1964, Mitchell concentrates her mark-making at the center of the canvas, and allows the composition to become lighter and more ethereal at the edges. The dense, vibrating mass of ultramarine is shot through with cool reds and mossy greens, and interrupted by bright, Aegean blue. At this time, Mitchell had permanently relocated to France, and the beauty of the natural landscapes surrounding Vétheuil, where Monet lived for several years before moving to nearby Giverny, are apparent in this work. The resultant concentration of dark values in the center — emblematic of this particular series — creates a feeling of both spatial and emotional depth.

The work has been exhibited at Inverleith House at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2010, and at Hauser & Wirth, London, for the 2007 exhibition Joan Mitchell: Leaving America. In the accompanying catalogue, Helen Molesworth wrote:

"[Mitchell's] deployment of painting’s elemental building blocks—color and stroke— results in paintings that are analogous to poetry. If in poetry language is both sharpened and distilled, both loaded with and emptied of meaning, then in Mitchell’s canvases the elements of paintings—paint, color and canvas—are both themselves and at the same time replete with expressive connotation."

Scully’s Landline paintings resonate with the same urgency and freedom as they did in 2013 when the artist began the series; it has since been elevated to the title of his 2019 retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.. Thick horizontal bands of subtly-layered color provide his compositions with rhythmic pulse, while the interactions between striations of paint bristle with energy. While Scully’s paintings recall, on their surface, the contours of the actual landscapes that inspired them, they deepen along levels of recent personal experience and trauma—both physical and emotional.

“I think of land, sea, sky. And they always make a massive connection. I try to paint this, this sense of the elemental coming together of land and sea, sky and land…stacked in horizon lines endlessly beginning and ending…” – Sean Scully