Influences Essay Sample: Jackson Pollock - Paper Example

Jackson Pollock was an influential American painter and a significant figure in the abstract expressionist organization. He was well known for his extensive, unique style drip paintings. Abstract expressionism is a type of art that utilizes emotions to express ideas. Artists create spontaneously using their instincts and sometimes their whole body to paint large canvases, an act referred to as action painting. Pollock made art that has had a powerful influence on artists from the mid-twentieth century through today. His art continues to be redefined through presents young artists.

During his early years, Pollock discovered a broad range of styles and art forms that influenced his artistic development. They included the expressive style of contemporary Mexican muralist, the dream images of surrealists, the lyrical lines of Asian calligraphy, the raw force of works by Pablo and Picasso, and the physical process involved in creating Navajo sand paintings. Therefore, he combined his creative experiments to produce an entirely new way to paint. Dipping sticks or hardened brushes into cans of house paint, Pollock poured, flung, and dripped paint onto large canvases spread on the floor. He felt compelled to express his emotions through painting and thus, relied on his intuition and his body to infuse his images with emotional force.

However, his process was not all physical. He spent a lot of time thinking about the canvas at his feet before setting his paint in motion. By controlling his movements, he directed gentle spatters, thin arcs, and powerful diagonals of color onto his canvas. The drip paintings he made were unlike any paintings are seen before, and they caused a sensation and established a new way of making art, one that made the act of creation visible. This was evident in one of Pollocks most recognized paintings called Lavender Mist, which was approximately seven feet in height and almost ten feet wide.

In this work, Pollock made dense, complex layers with white, blue, yellow, silver, umber, rosy pink, and black paint. Notably, he did not use any lavender paint on the canvas although where the pink and the blue-black colors meet, it looks like lavender. Evidently, Pollocks handprints are visible at the upper left and right edges of the canvas, which are literal traces of his presence in work. Pollocks revolutionary art bypassed traditional ways of painting. He invented a technique that was uniquely his.

Evidently, this uniqueness was evident in the form of his work. The usual idea of form in art encompasses a beginning, middle, and end, or any variant of this principle, for example, fragmentation. One cannot enter a Pollocks painting in any one place. Anywhere is everywhere, and one can dip in and out when and where they can. Notably, through this aspect, Pollocks art gives the impression of on forever, a true insight that suggests how he ignored the confines of the rectangular field of his canvas in favor of a continuum going in all directions simultaneously, beyond the accurate dimensions of any work. Thus, the four sides of the paintings are an abrupt leaving off of the activity, which our imaginations continue outward indefinitely, as though refusing to accept the artificiality of an ending.

Pollocks innovation in his work is valid because he understood with perfect naturalness how to do it. Pollock by using an iterative principle of a few highly charged elements continually undergoing variation gives artists an all-over unity, and a means to respond constantly to the freshness of personal choice. Nevertheless, this form allows artists equal pleasure in participating in delirium, a deadening of the reasoning faculties, and a loss of self. Notably, this strange combination of extreme individuality and selflessness makes Pollocks work remarkably potent although it indicates a probably larger frame of psychological reference.

The ideas and themes in his work arose from his explorative journey of the unconscious, which was intensified through the Surrealist practice of automatic writing and drawing. The practice provided Pollock with a method to access the imagery rooted in his unconscious. The dynamics of the development of his abstract painting style would seem to have originated from a strong tension of renunciation as if in the role of the revolutionary he had to continually remind himself of his spiritual chains to spur his progress towards freedom. Also, there was particular American appropriateness in his way of arriving at abstraction and in the manner he allowed naturalism to re-assert its claims. Both aspects were part of a related pattern. His most resolutely non-objective manner always carried with it a vague halo of ideas and near-images and intermittently uncovered in its depths some residual ties to natural reality.

For example, in the painting Night Sounds a crescent moon dramatically illuminates the surrounding darkness. The composition is flat, resembling a chalkboard instead of a night sky, onto which ominous symbols are foreshadowing the loose notations of a Jean-Michel Basquiat have been drawn in pastel. The moon is a theme rich in polarities. The contrast between light and dark, concrete and dissolving imagery, can serve as a metaphor for natures tidal rhythms of clarity and mystery.

Pollocks themes changed continuously. He never set out to tell a cohesive story. Instead, he committed fully to the freedom of expression; he visited, revisited, sought, discovered, and embarked anew in cyclical or tidal motions. For example, in Autumn Rhythm, the cyclical motions, coloring, lines, shapes, sense of space brought out Pollocks feelings and attitudes. 

Pollock owes his ambivalent popularity to his impressive use of dripping. The color stream can be regulated by the consistency and quantity of the absorbed pigment, but mainly using the hands and arms movements. Nevertheless, the themes were never always deliberate. Moreover, the Autumn Rhythm shows that not all color traces were created deliberately, which introduces the aspect of coincidence as an essential element in the creative process.

To conclude, Jackson Pollock influences todays artists to paint what they are. Moreover, he once stated that every good painter paints what he is. By connecting with his inner self, he created an autonomous and sovereign artistic reality, powered by its dynamism and monumental in its scale and breadth of feeling. Pollocks crudeness is manifestly frank and uncultivated, directness he never had to strive after because he had it by nature. This sincerity of his quest continues to resonate truthfully today, and because of that, Pollock continues to inspire. His work, ideas, and themes leave people at the point where they must become preoccupied with and dazzled by the space and objects of everyday life. Moreover, objects of every sort are materials for the new art.