Thursday, April 30, 2020

Jackson Pollock - What lies beneath

In front of Pollock's house are a couple boulders. Pollock detected the boulders under his lawn with his knife in the backyard, dug them up and stacked them on his lawn.. It's fitting, his search of what lies beneath the surface, not only permeates his painting but his quirky landscaping process.

When asked why he didn’t paint things like flowers, he said, “if you want to see a flower, go look at a flower... it will be better than anything you try to paint.” He tried to paint feelings.Here you can see pictures of the house. Pollack was a very big man... and the inside of the house was very small. You could imagine he would fill up the entire room with his presence.Pollock, born in 1912 grew up in California and came to nyc in 1930. At that time Paris was the center of the art world. Cubists were showing objects from multiple view points, surrealists were tapping into the unconscious mind, and Dadaists were like punks using irreverence to debunk artistic  standards. Artists like pollock would see European artists in the museum of modern art as well as Mexican muralists who tapped into their cultural heritage to deal with modern subjects, (Diego Rivera, frida Kahlo). 


A lot of artists in that time had no work because of the Great Depression. There was a government program WPA which sustained a lot of artists during this time. Pollock studied art at the arts students league, a building in midtown Manhattan that Rand and a lot of other artists would study at.Like architects who were trying to find an American voice, pollock was trying to find a voice for American artists. He ended up with expresssionism. To find visual equivalents of happiness, anger, sadness, he didn’t draw faces.., he thought that was corny, so he turned to abstract forms to convey the message. He wanted to express his feelings rather than illustrate them.The idea of abstraction is to get down to the basics - strip away all the superficial things, outward appearance, narratives, and you get the essence of a subject. Pollock never made sketches, painting just happened. Just in the act of painting, ideas would come to him, and he would improvise.he spread his canvas on the floor, and walked and worked on it from all four sides. He would spend hours walking around his Long Island home looking at nature. Then his feelings were transmitted to the canvas. He would tell viewers to approach his paintings with an open mind, without preconceived notions of what it should be. That’s why he often gave his paintings titles which were numbers rather than names. 


In the back of his house, pollock converted a storage barn into a studio by installing wood floors and a large north window. He would lay out a canvas on the floor prepare it with primer or glue and paint from above like oriental artists (Tibetan) or Native American sand painters... his approach was adapting a  ancient technique in a modern way. He would combine oil paints with house paints, add in sand, cigarette butts, broken glass, pebbles, string, wood etc.l for texture. Several paintings have his foot or handprints. He would always paint from above, his brushes never touched the canvas. His experiments were risky, sometimes they didn’t look good... but he didn’t worry about that... “each painting has a life of its own, I just try to let it live.”In addition to dripping paint, he would use basting syringes to squirt paint on canvas creating splattering effects. His paintings are like energy and motion made visible. You can see how his body whirled around above the canvas. If you look at the barn floor, it looks like a pollock painting too.for tibetans, a sand mandala is a vessel for blessings.. not a symbol of impermanence. before it's cleaned up and swept away, prayers are offered to it... filling every grain of sand.. which is then placed in a container and brought and sent down a river to to reach the ocean which spreads the blessings to the whole plane i remember when visiting his house, which is near amangansett. a story where pollock was so poor that he would pay the grocer with paintings. a painting worth probably hundreds of thousands today, if not more....Anyways, before pollock left California for nyc, he would admire and study Mexican mural art in magazines. In the 1930s a bunch of Mexican muralists came to America so pollock could watch and learn from them directly. When pollock arrived in nyc in 1930, orozco was here too. Orozco was painting murals at the new school.. he was painting people resisting oppression in India, Russia, and Mexico using fresco technique (like Michelangelo in Sistine chapel) and indigenous artists in pre-conquest mesoamerica. Orozco then went to Dartmouth college to paint the history of America civilization. These had characters and designs from ancient Mexican art too. Pollock was fascinated by native art and how these sources were adapted to modern painting. take something from a different world, adapt it, creating something new.





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