Jackson Pollock

This Sunday, is the final installment in our Paint by the Spirit series. We may come back to it again. This week our artist is Jackson Pollock.

There are many interpretations that can be given to Pollock’s work. It is sometimes referred to as Abstract Expressionism (as opposed to Impressionism). It is said to be an expression of what was inside the artist. Pollock himself said, “Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.”

Pollock practiced an “all-over” style of distribution of line and color that prevented climactic emphasis on any one point.

Pollock’s paintings had no center and this may be his main message—that the age in which he lived lacked a center, a focal point.

Notice Pollock’s comments in this interview:

WW: Mr. Pollock, there's been a good deal of controversy and a great many comments have been made regarding your method of painting. Is there something you'd like to tell us about that?
JP: My opinion is that new needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements. It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age find it’s own technique.

WW: Mr. Pollock, the classical artists had a world to express and they did so by representing the objects in that world. Why doesn't the modern artist do the same thing?
JP: The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world -- in other words -- expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

WW: Would it be possible to say that the classical artist expressed his world by representing the objects, whereas the modern artist expresses his world by representing the effects the objects have upon him?
JP: Yes, the modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

I think Pollock was painting what WB Yeats wrote in The Second Coming.

National Gallery of Art site concerning "Lavender Mist"

Good article and several works here.

Our Scripture for Sunday is Psalm 46.

The worship bulletin for Sunday is here.