“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.”
Paul Jackson Pollock was a difficult man, volatile, reclusive and an alcoholic, but he has become one of the most important abstract artists of the twentieth century.
Number 31
“My painting does not come from the easel, I need the resistance of a hard surface.”
“On the floor, I’m more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since that way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”
Ocean Greyness
“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.”
Number 14 Grey
In October 1945, Pollock married American painter Lee Krasmer. In November, they moved out of New York to the Springs area of East Hampton on the South Shore of Long Island. Here under his wife’s calming influence, he found some relative peace.
.Seven in Eight
Mural on Indian Red Ground
Blue Poles
The Key
Sadly he died young at the age of 44, but during his most productive period, between 1945 to 1956,he single-handedly changed the face of abstract art.
A major retrospective exhibition is currently in the Tate Gallery, Liverpool UK until October 2015.
