Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956)

Excerpted from "My Painting" in Possibilities I, Winter 1947-48 (source: Johnson)

My painting does not come from the easel. I hardly ever 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.

Lavender Mist: Number 1, 1950, National Gallery of Art
Image courtesy of Mark Harden's Artchive

     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 and other foreign matter added.
     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, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

From an interview with William Wright in 1950 (source: Johnson)

WW: Mr. Pollock, in your opinion, what is the meaning of modern art?
JP: Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.

WW: Did the classical artists have any means of expressing their age?
JP: Yes, they did it very well. All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims -- the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

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 its 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: H'm -- 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 moderns 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.

WW: Mr. Pollock, isn't it true that... your technique is important and interesting only because of what you accomplish by it?
JP: I hope so. Naturally, 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.

From a response to a questionnaire, Arts and Architecture, February 1944 (source: Johnson)

Q: Do you think there can be a purely American art?
Pollock: The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd.... And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by that fact, whether he wills it or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.