My take on: Jackson Pollock

“When I’m painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It’s only after a get acquainted period that I see what I’ve been about. I’ve no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.” – Jackson Pollock

Let’s get lost in the World of Art shall we? If you follow me on Facebook you might have seen a couple of art-links I share; usually from the Whitney Museum, MET or MOMA which are my favorite museums in New York. I love to walk around in museums for hours and read on all the artists that I admire. Usually before I go to a museum; especially the Met, I do a little research online where I want to go exactly and what I want to see given that this particular museum is just breathtakingly huge and you could literally walk for days and still have not seen it all.

I fell in love with Jackson Pollock and his paining after seeing this documentary. I was hooked and wanted to find out everything about him and see all his paintings displayed in museums all over the U.S. The painting shown above is called “Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)” and is currently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. If you like abstract expressionists  you will love Jackson Pollock (1912-1956). He was a very influential American painter and is now considered the leading force of the expressionist movement. Pollock was well known for his very special type of drip painting technique on canvas. 

Jackson Pollock studied at the Students’ League in New York and met and worked with Thomas Hart Benton. (Awesome!). Pollock was influenced by Surrealism and Diego Rivera but created his own style nonetheless.  If you watch the documentary you will find out that he was famous; however, his very reclusive and unstable personality mixed with his struggle with alcoholism weren’t the best combination. He kept drinking heavily even though he married the artist Lee Krasner in 1945, who tried to make him stop drinking that much and  who was a very important influence on his career. Jackson Pollock was only 44 years old when he died in a car accident while driving himself under the influence of alcohol. He became very famous after his death with many exhibits all over the world. 

“Jackson Pollock’s greatness lies in developing one of the most radical abstract styles in the history of modern art, detaching line from color, redefining the categories of drawing and painting, and finding new means to describe pictorial space.”

 Most of his painting are huge canvases and were painted on the floor or hung on a wall. He used a this special style of letting the paint drip from the paint can. He usually never used paint brush but instead wooden sticks, knives, towels, you name it. This style is very unique and makes his artwork stick out. I love that his art totally avoids any specific or clear points and structure but it all makes sense when you look at it. Or when I look at it. 🙂 

“There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.” – Jackson Pollock

After 1951, he started painting mostly in darker colors, or just in black. This period in his life is called “Black pourings” but he did not sell any paintings. He started using color again afterwards. If you enjoy Pollocks’ work, you might also like paintings by Arshile Gorky, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko or Willem de Kooning which are all on my top ten Abstract Expressionists list. 

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!'” – Jackson Pollock

Thank you for reading and maybe you plan a museum visit to see the Abstract Expressionists.