Jackson Pollock - Abstract Expressionism

"My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. "

" I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added."

"When I am in my 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 fear of 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."

Jackson Pollock became an absolute sensation in the art world for breaking from the fundamental method of applying paint to canvas. Instead of rigid, precise color mixing and attention to brushwork, Pollock more rather "danced" around the giant canvases he laid on the floor of his barn. Dripping latex house paint from buckets, letting dirt and cigarette ash fall into the wet paint, and pouring over entire surfaces led to a museum experience that was at once overwhelming and shocking. Here was a complete departure from Cubist, Futurist, solid and weighty geometric compositions which were previously in vogue in the New York scene.

Pollock became the focus of attention of Formalist critic Clement Greenberg, who in essence believed that the formal qualities of art where those which truly mattered. Viewed from this way, a painting would lose most or all of its subject matter and give way simply to an experience of pure medium. Pollock's work contained different artistic elements of texture, blended media, and questionable "accidents." It is true, in fact, that in the upper corner of one of Pollock's many drip paintings, there is a cicaida which wandered through the wet paint and got stuck, where it still remains today.

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