Is it possible to paint like jackson pollock today

Pollock later said that the wide-open land of these western areas greatly influenced his expansive artwork. There, Pollock spent a few years studying with the artist Thomas Hart Benton who painted images of every day American life. Pollock's early works are similar to his teacher's kind of painting. However, Pollock slowly left this traditional art education behind. Pollock's work had many other influences. For example, he liked a group of Mexican painters who made murals.

Murals are large images that the artists paint directly onto a wall. Some of these painters were working in New York City in the nineteen thirties, so Pollock was able to see them work. Pollock borrowed several methods and ideas from these artists.

They included the use of large canvases, the method of freely applying paint and honoring old and new traditions. Pollock was also influenced by the Spanish artist Miro. Miro was part of a movement of surrealist painters. Surrealist artists thought that true art comes from a part of the mind called the unconscious. The unconscious controls the area of the mind that produces dreams. Pollock agreed with these artists that the unconscious mind was an important force in creating art.

Also, when he was in his late twenties, Pollock suffered a mental breakdown. It was caused in part by depression and dependence on alcohol. As a result, he was treated by a Jungian psychoanalyst.

This is a special kind of expert in emotional health who works to understand the unconscious mind, dreams, and emotions. Pollock was influenced by this kind of investigation of human relations and emotions.

This "inside world" would become the subject of his paintings. In nineteen forty-four, Pollock married Lee Krasner who was also a skilled Abstract Expressionist painter. The couple wanted to get away from the busy life of New York City.

In this country environment they could enjoy nature and have more time to work on their art. Next to their house Pollock set up a studio building where he could create his artwork. In this large studio Pollock created the paintings that would make him famous. During these years Jackson Pollock started to paint in a completely new way. He created art that was very physical. In fact, his method is sometimes called "action painting".

Most artists painted on a surface that stood upright or vertical. But Pollock put his large canvases on the floor so that he could move around all four sides of his work. He also used very liquid paints so that he could easily drop the paint onto his canvases. A close look at this work reveals the decisions the artist was making in the act of painting.

Some of the paints are matte, while others are glossy, and the lines vary from thick to thin and drawn out. In a few places, the intricate network of colors is so complex that it is difficult to establish an exact order of their application, and it is likely that Pollock went back and forth between colors, using them at both early and late stages of painting.

Elsewhere, the lower paint layer was dry before another layer was applied. Jackson Pollock, Autumn Rhythm Number The Painting Techniques of Franz Kline. Practice: Abstract Expressionism. Next lesson. Current timeTotal duration Google Classroom Facebook Twitter. 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.

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.