Jackson Pollock

cycles of Pollock’s life and art overlap at times, sometimes appearing to have the ambivalent traits of a child-man, angel-beast, and creator-destroyer. Many observers of his work are both kept at a distance by what is ugly and yet pulled into what is beautiful in the realities

Many of the events in Pollock’s life and much of his radically new art proved to be mystically profane and ugly, yet awesome. At times the artist, like his art, appears to be innocent, graceful and sensitive. At the same time, his life and art might seem to be crude, macho and abrasive. The biographer Andrea Gabor considers him to be “brilliant and naïve, gentle and aggressive, vulnerable and destructive.”

Apparently, Pollock was unaware of her awe of him as an artist. Kligman mentioned that after she was with Pollock for several days, he surprised her by asking if she knew he was a painter.

Lucifer was listed in 2003 as one of the ten most wanted works of art of the year, according to ARTNews magazine in its list of ‘elusive masterworks collectors would die for’.
The work was expected to fetch up to $100 million, according to the magazine.

You have to be happy in the process. You can’t be waiting for some future redemption when you’ll be called the greatest writer in the world.

He said: When I am ‘in’ my painting, I’m 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. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony.

Pollock understood that sobriety was a prerequisite for reaching the ‘automatic response’ needed for his best work.

In Pollock’s famous reply, “I am nature”, the artist revealed again one of his key ideas, one which might have been rooted in the Theosophy he had studied fifteen years earlier.

Pollock’s frustration at not being able to draw was certainly a factor. It is seen in his famous comment, “Do you think I would have painted this crap if I knew how to draw a hand?”

The result is the thing – and – it doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement. Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we’re living in...