Introduction
Paul Jackson Pollock born 1912, died 1956, was an American abstract painter who practiced the ‘Action Painting’ technique. This was a new technique that very few painters of his era practiced. In this technique of painting, paint of different colors and materials, including industrial and house coating paints, is splashed, dripped, smeared and dribbled on a canvas. The mass of paint is then formed into different layers using knives, brush, fingers, sticks, trowels and other items. Jackson Pollock mastered this technique and while such paintings look like a mess of colors, careful inspection reveals that the paintings have very intricate patterns that put a living form for the painting. One of his best known paintings was ‘Convergence’ created around 1952 (Harrison, 2007). An image of the painting is given below.
Naifeh’s opinion
Naifeh (1989) has pointed out that Jackson’s paintings to a great extent reveal the turmoil he inflicted on himself and t depression bouts that he went through. He had also taken up to drinking and had alcohol related problems. The paintings bring appear chaotic at the first glance, but closer inspection revels very fine details that symbolize the struggle of the artists spirit when bogged down in a mire of life. The painting reveals the struggle that a human spirit is undergoing as it gets caught in a morass. The white splashes can be regarded as spirits that are liberated from the black morass, the red splashes can be regarded as the spirits that have been blooded as they struggle against life forces.
Technique that Jackson used
Naifeh (1989) has suggested that the technique that Jackson used was not random splashes of color, which even a monkey can do. According to the author, the artist direct paint and made it drip by using tubes and cans of paint. The act of carefully monitoring and guiding the drips is as skilled as the act of painting by using a fine brush. When Jackson was actually painting, all his actions were done by his sub conscious and he would go in a trance like state as the painting came up. The canvas were spread on the floor and Jackson would be painting from all the four sides, sometimes using multiple layers.
Writing further, Naifeh comments that the paintings reveal hidden fractals that are higher form of fractions and used in advanced mathematics. There have been suggestions that Jackson was attempting to define the Chaos Theory, ten years before the theory was proposed.
Harrison (2007) suggests that Jackson was totally consummated by his paintings and she speaks of tragedies such as his bouts of alcoholism, the estrangement with his wife, the intense bouts of depression that he faced. To a large extent, these negative influences were brought to the fore in his works. Speaking of Convergence, the author comments that in later years of his life, Jackson became aware of nature and its beauty and remembered the wide open spaces he used to see when he accompanied his father who was a road surveyor. Jackson’s paintings attempt to bring back nature and the random flecks and spots that are seen in the paintings represent various fractals and glimpses of life.
Naifeh (1989) points out that one of his paintings fetched a record sum of $140,000,000 when it was auctioned in 2006.
References
Harrison Helen. 2006. Jackson Pollock Bio: Pollock Krasner House and Study Center. Web.
Naifeh, Steven and Smith, Gregory White. 1989. Jackson Pollock:an American saga, Published by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. Web.