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The Painting Techniques of Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock revolutionized painting by ditching the easel and pouring paint onto a canvas on the floor. Using unconventional tools like sticks and turkey basters, he created an all-over rhythm of lines, liberating them from their traditional role of defining shapes. This action painting method influenced many artists and marked a pivotal moment in American art history. Created by The Museum of Modern Art.

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  • mr pink red style avatar for user James Tribe
    According to Modern Art, it seems like 'throwing something out the window' is automatically a good thing. No one seems to stop and consider why classical 'rules' existed in the first place. They want to "challenge" traditional notions of art; well, i like traditional notions of art, so who decided it needed challenging and why is this necessarily a good thing?
    (33 votes)
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    • orange juice squid orange style avatar for user Paul Norwood
      This is timing-dependent, as the discussions of Duchamp and Warhol suggest. It will only work if the society the artist works in is ready for those traditional notions to be challenged. Modern art also introduces new possibilities in a world where digital photography and photo-realism have people wondering if their art has a future.
      (21 votes)
  • female robot grace style avatar for user divaCassandra1
    From its sale in November of 2006 until 2011, when one of Paul Cézanne's The Card Players sold for a price variously estimated at between $250 million and $300 million, Pollock's No. 5, 1948 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._5,_1948) was the most expensive work of art ever sold, at an estimated $140,000,000.

    What make a work of art worth that much money?
    (19 votes)
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    • orange juice squid orange style avatar for user Paul Norwood
      Art and antiquities are often seen as a good hedge against the stock market (gold isn't reliable at all). If you think about it, not only are Pollock paintings no longer being painted, every decade a few of them go into museums, which means that supply on the market is ever-diminishing. On the other hand, the amount of capital in people's hands is pretty much unlimited and almost always growing.
      (19 votes)
  • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user ∫∫ Greg Boyle  dG dB
    Besides accumulating the materials to make an action work like this, what type of forethought went in to making this painting? Did the artist just react to the trance like state as the presenter stated or did he have some preconceived notion that he just let happen as he got painting?
    (17 votes)
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    • leaf blue style avatar for user Peterson
      Jackson Pollock's approach to painting was, and still is, well-known for its lack of visible structure and forethought. I do not think it could be considered a trance, necessarily, but Pollock certainly did react to the mood which he was in when painting these works, and they reflect that perfectly. Abstract Expressionism paintings show their labelling well - they are abstract, and through that lack of structure, express emotions and inner psyches. To be sure, there must have been something that prompted Pollock (and other AE artists) to paint what they did, but most of the time, the final result was really from chance, stemming from the overarching emotion or idea that was trying to be portrayed.
      (11 votes)
  • leaf green style avatar for user John
    Didn't Pollock grow up on the Navajo Reservation, and couldn't his technique be likened to Navajo sand painting in that it's an art of the doing, not an art of the having done?
    (11 votes)
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  • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user Dayvyd
    - "the line is liberated" - what does this even mean? What is the importance of a line, other than its function?
    (6 votes)
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    • leaf blue style avatar for user Peterson
      The line is liberated from its past function of being a tool to construct outlines of objects. Think about it this way: in paintings up to the Modern era of visual art, the line would have been used to present the form of a house, or a hill or mountain. Lines would designate borders between clothing, the petals of a flower, and so on. But remember - the line was always subject to what it was meant to portray and describe. Now, in these works, the line itself become the art, or at the least the focus of the art. No longer is it just a tool by which we create other objects, but it is the central object. It has been liberated from its previous "bondage" of serving others' purposes, and is now the very soul of the colors and forms on the canvas, free to be its own centrality of art.
      (6 votes)
  • piceratops tree style avatar for user conrrado123
    According to Modern Art, it seems like 'throwing something out the window' is automatically a good thing. No one seems to stop and consider why classical 'rules' existed in the first place. They want to "challenge" traditional notions of art; well, i like traditional notions of art, so who decided it needed challenging and why is this necessarily a good thing?
    (6 votes)
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    • winston default style avatar for user Sofia S
      Art is all about finding new ways to express human nature and other sentiments. We often like that which is traditional, but newer interpretations and methods are supposed to make you feel and think in the same way that older, more traditional art attempts.
      (4 votes)
  • duskpin sapling style avatar for user Huanhuan Chen
    How do people use this form of art today?
    (3 votes)
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  • female robot grace style avatar for user divaCassandra1
    The wikipedia article about Jackson Pollock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_Pollock) states, "Some posthumous exhibitions of Pollock's work were sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an organization to promote American culture and values backed by the CIA." Why would the CIA have anything to do with art?
    (3 votes)
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    • orange juice squid orange style avatar for user Paul Norwood
      If I understand this correctly, the CIA was a secret funding vehicle for activities that would normally be overtly performed by the state department. The idea was to assert the non-communist world's artistic preeminence. It was money well spent. After all, how much socialist art do you see in the playlist on the left?
      (4 votes)
  • male robot hal style avatar for user Wudaifu
    Why isn't the gentleman who is demonstrating Jackson Pollack's painting techniques as well known or as appreciated as Pollock, because to my ignorant eyes, he seems to be producing art that is every bit as good/interesting as Pollock's? Can someone please explain how/why Pollock's art is superior to what we saw being made in this video?
    (3 votes)
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    • mr pants teal style avatar for user Cyrus Parson
      Great question. I suppose you have a fair point here, though it is important to note that Jackson Pollock caught the imagination of the public (at about ) and introduced this radically new way of creating art. Jackson Pollock was a great artist (as one could say about anything, as it is all very subjective), but one wouldn't call his work or anyone else's work for that matter "superior" to other works, at least in a general sense.

      Art is a way of expression, freedom that one can use to convey anything in a myriad of ways. Therefore, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and a very subjective thing.

      As far as this gentleman, I'm unsure of his experience or reputation. A simple answer would be that he is simply later, not the first to make this style of art an important part of American art history. I would suggest researching more on Jackson Pollock. You'll likely find a more concrete or efficient answer to your inquiry, and more questions to find the answers to.

      Also, you don't need to say that you are in any way ignorant; in a sense, we are all shrouded in ignorance as there is simply too much knowledge. Your effort to expand your knowledge, however, is a clear attempt to shine an inquisitive light onto the plane.
      (3 votes)
  • hopper happy style avatar for user Vagdevi
    what did Jackson try to paint?
    (2 votes)
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    • leaf blue style avatar for user Peterson
      Jackson Pollock was not concerned with painting objects that we can see and comprehend in our everyday life, such as landscapes, seascapes, or architecture. Instead, his focus was twofold: first, he wanted to show action through how he applied the paint to his canvases, and, secondly, to show his emotions and psyche through the randomness that was on the canvas. It may be hard to understand at first, but once you realize where Pollock was coming from, his paintings suddenly take on so much meaning, and open up a whole new universe within the genre of visual art.
      (3 votes)

Video transcript

Voiceover: Three years prior to the making of this painting, Pollock was working on a small easel painting. He had struggled on it for a while, and he decided to take that painting off the easel, place it on the floor, and then pour some paint on the surface to finish it. >From this deceptively simple decision, an entire set of creative possibilities opened up to Pollock, and he spent the next five years of his career exploring them. Now, in the studio, let's see exactly how Pollock worked. Placing the canvas on the floor, Pollock no longer remained in physical contact with the canvas while painting. Instead of using conventional artist brushes to push or smear liquid paint across the surface of the painting, Pollock now used things like sticks, even turkey basters or dried paint brushes, hard as a rock, that he variously dripped, drizzled, poured, or splashed paint onto the canvas below him from. Pollock used very fluid alkyd enamel paints, the kind of paint you could paint your car with, the kind of paint you could paint your radiator with. Because the paint was so fluid, Pollock essentially drew in space, so that drawing elements would happen quite literally in the air, before falling down to the canvas below, sometimes thick, sometimes thin. A rhythm of poured paint would develop across the surface of the painting. Now, if you know that the painting was painted on the floor, if you know that the paint has a very low viscosity, you can very easily imagine the kind of physical activities that would go into the making of this type of painting. Art historians, at the time, coined this kind of painting, action painting, because of this very idea that you could imagine quite viscerally the actions that went into the making of the painting. Now, specifically, we're talking about the actions of almost a dancer. You can imagine Pollock's feet shuffling around the painting. You can imagine rotations of the elbow and of the shoulder, variously launching or slowly drizzling paint onto the canvas below. For Pollock, the drama of making this painting on the floor meant that not only physically but emotionally he could be in the painting, stepping into the canvas, but also losing himself in almost this trance-like or zone-like type of painting process. Looking at the paint below you on the surface of the canvas, reacting to it, and adjusting whatever gestures you have to create this painting. Now, traditionally in painting, people would compose one shape according to another one. A little bit of red here, according to a little bit of blue there, according to a lot of yellow over here. Well, for Pollock, he threw that out the window, as he did so many things. Rather, Pollock is composing one line in juxtaposition with another one, and not in any haphazard way, but rather in an all over way, and this all-overness, if you will, becomes key for Pollock. Since looking at this painting, there's no one spot for your eye to rest. Traditionally, line had been used quite literally to delineate forms, to draw the outlines of forms, which would be filled in. You can imagine landscape paintings. The lines define the mountains, clouds, and so on. Well, here the line is not defining anything. Line becomes here autonomous, and for the first time is liberated from its historical role in painting of describing other shapes. In 1950, the drama of making this painting was actually captured by a photographer and film maker, so that the performance of making this painting captured the public's imagination as never before. Not only that, but other artists were profoundly influenced by this radically new way of working, not only painters, but, well, performance artists can be traced back to this very very formative moment, very important moment in American art history.