Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was an American painter best known for his contributions to abstract expressionism and drip painting. Painter Helen Frankenthaler said regarding Pollock,
"In the most positive sense, I think it was a sense of being as open and free and surprised as possible, with a magic sense of... being able to know when to stop, when to labor, when to be puzzled, when to be satisfied, when to recognize beautiful or strange or ugly or clumsy, and to be free with what you are making that comes out of you." (Interview with Barbara Rose, 1968)The rest of this post is some quotes from Pollock.
Abstract art
"I hardly stretch my canvas before painting. 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 a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. This is akin to the method of the Indian sand painters of the West." (Quoted in Possibilities, 1947)
"When I am in my painting, I am 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." (Quoted in Possibilities, 1947)
"Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was." (Interview with Berton Roueche, 1950)
Modern art
"The thing that interests me is that today's painters do not have to go to a subject-matter outside themselves. Modern painters work in a different way. They work from within." (Quoted in Lives of the Great Twentieth Century Artists by Edward Lucie-Smith)
"Well, painting today certainly seems very vibrant, very alive, very exciting. Five or six of my contemporaries around New York are doing very vital work, and the direction that painting seems to be taken here is away from the easel into some sort, some kind of wall, wall painting..." (Interview with William Wright, 1950)
