The Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painter Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011) had a way of ignoring boundaries . As a child, she drew a line in chalk on the ground from the Metropolitan Museum to her family’s apartment on 74th Street. Later, she did away with the idea of “paint on canvas” by essentially fusing the paint and the canvas: saturating unprimed grounds with liquidy, thinned-out oil and acrylic .

In “Abstract Climates: Helen Frankenthaler in Provincetown,” at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, N.Y., we see her develop this signature method by immersing herself in the landscape on the Massachusetts coast (sometimes literally, as in a photograph of Frankenthaler swimming right outside her waterfront home and studio). At the same time, we see a young artist responding to the pressures of increasing fame and a new family life by trying to set some limits.

Spanning the years 1950 to 1969, “Abstract Climates” (which debuted at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum last summer) deftly interweaves creative and personal breakthroughs with a combination of artworks and ephemera. It culminates in a rapturous, triumphant gallery of the large-scale “soak stain” paintings that gave rise to the Color Field movement — works like “Flood” (1967), with its translucent pink-and-orange waves lapping at strips of blue and green.