Jackson Pollock

Once I started to ‘get’ abstract art, I became a fan of Jackson Pollock- even though I probably couldn’t come close to explaining why at the time. I just thought they looked cool. And while that is still part of it, I think I can come closer to explaining something that might be of interest or value. Incidentally, Jackson Pollock currently holds the record for the most amount of money ever paid for a painting. Entertainment mogul David Geffen sold a Pollock painting for about $148 Million to a collector in Mexico (I think). Not a bad haul.

Ok- so what’s the big deal about this guy who slings paint around much like a 2 or 3 year old? (And, subsequently, why can’t you sell your child’s ‘masterpieces’ for $148M?) Well, it’s kind of like something funny that comes up in the course of a situation or conversation that is only funny to the participants, in other words, “you had to be there.” You kind of have to really ‘be there’ to get his works. And here’s some of what it means to ‘be there’ with regard to art: it’s not about what it is but what it is doing.

So let’s take a Still Life, for example, like a picture of flowers. Those who ‘don’t understand art’ see it for what it (apparently) is- a bunch of flowers. Artists will look at the same picture and see how the flowers are placed within the picture and what the placement does in terms of movement or balance. And/or they’ll look at the colors and see what they are doing- harmonizing with each other? Clashing with each other? Describing the colors we see? Evoking emotions?

And here’s another crucial difference- artist’s see things that way when they are looking at ‘ordinary’ objects- not just paintings of those objects. So let’s follow that. An artist looks at an arrangement of flowers and it ‘affects’ him or her. So the artist illustrates the flowers in an attempt to record those feelings and convey that to someone else. The problem is- what if the person viewing the painting doesn’t have the same emotional response because they’re not into flowers (they like sunsets)? Then the artist has failed to communicate his or her experience. So, instead of depicting the source of his or her emotional response- the flowers- the artist attempts to depict in some way the experience itself. Then the viewer can take that experience and connect with it- “oh yeah, I once saw a sunset that made me feel the same way!” And it’s when you try to depict an experience – which in itself is abstract- that you start getting abstract art.

In Jackson Pollock’s case, we have a troubled individual- an alcoholic (though I’m always quick to point out his best paintings came from the 2 or 3 years when he was not drinking)- living in troubled times- think of World War II and the Atom Bomb. Often troubled feelings like this are buried deep in people’s subconscious- we react to someone doing something relatively insignificant, but it’s not really what they did that made us so mad but the fact that it happened at a time when so much other stuff was troubling us, even though we weren’t actually conscious of it. So with that in mind, consider this quote from the artist himself:

“When I am in a painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.”

There was a group of artists originating around the 1920’s called the Surrealists who would use a technique called ‘automatic drawing’ to bring up images buried in their subconscious. In essence it could be like doodling- only they felt that if you weren’t controlling the line to depict something, the shapes that would naturally flow through your arm and hand would be dictated by your subconscious thoughts and feelings. Jackson Pollock would begin his paintings that way and then study them- often for weeks or months at a time- so ‘see what I have been about.’ As recognition of those thoughts and feelings surfaced he would then make revisions and fine tune the lines and colors until the resulting painting matched his impressions. So the ‘beauty’ comes through in the harmony of the feelings and the means of depicting those feelings- not through illustrations, but through psychological associations with lines, shapes, colors, etc.

When this really hit home for me was when my lovely wife took me to New York to see his retrospective exhibition as a Christmas present. Being able to see almost all of his works, laid out chronologically, I was able to witness firsthand the fact that his splatter paintings actually got better. How can one splatter be ‘better’ than another? There was a greater degree of harmony once you became attuned to what the paint and the lines and the colors were doing rather than just looking at them as what they were- ‘messy splatters of paint that my three year old could do.’ As Jackson Pollock became more attuned to this in the process of painting he was able to depict his feelings with greater clarity.

I’ll admit- I’ve seen my kids make some cool things. But they are often just small sections of a larger ‘painting’ that on the whole is just a messy mess of paint or crayons or marker. The child lacks the intellectual skills to recognize a good thing when they see it (in the art world we call those ‘happy accidents’) and bring the rest of the disorderly picture in harmony with the good parts- the parts that strike a chord between color, shape, and line and the emotions that they convey. Jackson Pollock had that capacity, and he developed it further when he was not clouded by his addictions. And the results, once you’re ‘there’ in the ‘conversation,’ are breathtaking even far beyond what I’ve intimated here. (But we’ll just chew this elephant one bite at a time, shall we?)

And if you don’t believe me, consider this: every single time I had an art student attempt to do a ‘splatter’ painting like Jackson Pollock, they were astounded at how difficult it was and realized how horrible theirs looked in comparison with his. (Maybe you should try it sometime.)