Jackson Pollock and Ray Johnson

Jackson Pollock

In recent years modern artist Jackson Pollock, also known ad "Jack the Dipper" for his revolutionary technique that freed many from academic strictures, has become more and more famous. Jackson Pollock was born in Wyoming, but was raised in Arizona and California. In the late 1920's Jackson helped his father with a surveying job on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. This tells a lot about whom Jackson Pollock was as an artist because he had a fear and fascination with vast open spaces, some people believe that this is when his fear and fascination began (Baker, 32-36). During his childhood Jackson and his brothers spent time studying Indian mounds near Phoenix near where their mother worked as a housekeeper. This experience is probably why Pollock used Indian symbols in some of his paintings.

Jackson Pollock never finished high school because he left high school and Arizona to join his brother Charles Cecil Pollock at the Art Students League in New York. This move ended his time living in the west. At the Art Students League Pollock studied with Thomas Hart Benton a well-known artist of the Depression and Regionalist painter from Missouri. Benton was a huge influence on Pollock as an artist; he taught him that paintings were more about the experience than the resulting work. Benton promoted theories of rhythmic balance, dynamic sequence, and "muscular action patterns. Pollock used all of these techniques later in his work. (Arnheim, 162-180)

Like many artists Pollock was treated for alcoholic depression in the late 1930's. During this time he did a lot of expressive paintings, which he said were freeing him of Benton's influence and of his mental problems. In the 1940's his emotional problems led him to themes that were mythic and heroic in very abstract styles. One style he used was Abstract Expressionism. (Alloway, 36-42)

Jackson Pollock became the symbol of New American Painting after World War II when New York became the centre of the art world. It was a time when artists began to derive inspiration from their unconscious and Jung and Freud theories offered insight to discovering themselves. Their theories further gave justification to the abstract expressionist automatic method of painting which developed metaphors for the 'collective unconscious'.

Pollock's painting Cathedral 1947 is one of his first drip paintings. Such paintings were the first form of complete abstraction which Kandinsky and Picasso had previously used only to a degree. As it is pure abstraction, the painting is subjective and emotional, deriving its content from the unconscious of the artist (Alloway, 18-22). A sense of rhythm and unity is created through the surface texture and numerous amounts of spidery lines. Although spontaneity played a major role in the production of this painting, there is an intricacy and delicacy, an airy grace.

These drip paintings were given the name 'action paintings' by the critic Harold Rosenburg, who had significant influence on people's interpretation of Pollock's work. He coined the name from the creative process Pollock used when painting ...