Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock was an American influential painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was most well known for his distinctive style of drip painting. Pollock was a major artist of his generation.
Pollock was introduced to the use of liquid paint in 1936 at an experimental workshop in New York City. He later used paint pouring as one of several techniques on canvases of the early 1940s, after he began painting with his canvases laid out on the studio floor, and he developed what was later called his "drip" technique. He used hardened brushes, sticks, and even basting syringes as paint applicators. Pollock's technique of pouring and dripping paint is thought to be one of the origins of the term action painting . With this technique, Pollock was able to achieve more immediate means of creating art, the paint now literally flowing from his chosen tool onto the canvas.
Jackson inspired many other artist of all kinds, such as John Squire, a songwriter and artist but most commonly known as the guitarist for The Stone Roses. His work was displayed on the cover of The Stone Roses debut album The Stone Roses, and says it's a Pollock influenced piece entitled "Bye Bye Badman".
Lavender Mist (1950)
Jackson Pollock's Work
Alchemy
Alchemy is one of Jackson Pollock’s earliest poured paintings, executed in the revolutionary technique that constituted his most significant contribution to twentieth-century art. After long deliberation before the empty canvas, he used his entire body in a picture-making process that can be described as drawing in paint. By pouring streams of commercial paint onto the canvas from a can with the aid of a stick, Pollock made obsolete the conventions and tools of traditional easel painting. He often tacked the unstretched canvas onto the floor in an approach he likened to that of the Navajo Indian sandpainters, explaining that “on the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.” Surrealist notions of chance and automatism are given full expression in Pollock’s classic poured paintings, in which line no longer serves to describe shape or enclose form, but exists as an autonomous event, charting the movements of the artist’s body. As the line thins and thickens it speeds and slows, its appearance modified by chance behavior of the medium such as bleeding, pooling, or blistering.
When Alchemy is viewed from a distance, its large scale and even emphasis encourage the viewer to experience the painting as an environment. The layering and interpenetration of the labyrinthine skeins give the whole a dense and generalized appearance. The textured surface is like a wall on which primitive signs are inscribed with white pigment squeezed directly from the tube.
When Alchemy is viewed from a distance, its large scale and even emphasis encourage the viewer to experience the painting as an environment. The layering and interpenetration of the labyrinthine skeins give the whole a dense and generalized appearance. The textured surface is like a wall on which primitive signs are inscribed with white pigment squeezed directly from the tube.