Jackson Pollock: Painting In Action

Painting in Action

My understanding of action painting coming into this class was nonexistent. I had heard the name Jackson Pollock before and had seen some of his different paintings, but I hadn’t heard the term ‘action painting’ before. It wasn’t until this last week that we reached the portion in the book that even mentions Jackson Pollock or action painting. Despite how new the term is to me, and how little I had really looked at any of Pollock’s work, it’s honestly a fascinating style of art.

The picture I get in my mind of someone painting is them at an easel or somewhere stationary, working very diligently and seriously, but in the movie Pollock he’s portrayed as almost dancing around the canvas as he paints even when confined to a

small room full of his other paintings. While his work may seem careless, as if he’s splattering the paint any old place, the movie insinuates that Pollock hadn’t been careless at all, and this particular shows in a scene where his friend says one of the paintings is “too blue” for his liking so Pollock brings it in from his work area and as he goes to change it, he stops and can’t bring himself to change his work. He meant to put the paint exactly where it was and refused to change or deviate from how his work came out.
The movie showed many of his different works and one in particular that stood out to me was his painting “Mural” (1943) because of the sheer size of it.

It’s also hard to not follow the pattern of black zigzag like lines that stretch across it, but if you can get your eyes to look past it and see the different accentuating colors and shapes, it’s really an amazing work of art. I can only imagine how it would look at its full scale of 8 feet by 20 feet. That’s just an incredible size, and to see it in that size would allow for someone to see all the minute details and color flecks that are bound to be there, that you can’t see from a computer or television screen.

Our textbook mentions that some of Pollock’s colleagues also dabbled in his newfound style of painting, however the text doesn’t mention any of them specifically and I personally don’t know of any other ‘action painters’ besides Pollock. I think it’d be interesting to see how they incorporated ‘action painting’ into their own works and styles, whether they used ‘action painting’ to accentuate their own style or simply did entire works using it, and how they’d compare and contrast to Pollock’s own works.

Overall, I think ‘action painting’ is a unique style to Jackson Pollock and while it appears to be simple, careless, and childlike in composure, I believe it is far from any of

those.