I don't think anyone using Google this week could have missed that Wednesday was the anniversary of Pollock's birth.

I feel I need to say something because his work is more important to me than that of Titian and even of Klein, Duchamp, Rothko or Kandinsky. Only Ernst, Matisse and van Gogh stand in higher places in my Pantheon of visual artists.

Pollock's constructions with dripped and flicked paint seem for me to resemble the way in which light plays on the retina. The wild, frenetic and immensely complex lines and polygons to which the movement of the eye responds to reflected, refracted and directly emitted light as it assimilates spatial information. Thus, when he decontructs these patterns and recreates new abstract forms, an open mind can't help but rearrange them back into fleeting figurative images flashing across the screen of the mind's internal retina. The ghosts of real objects and spaces haunting us from both the past and the future. Pollocks canvasses are both still and in constant motion, but not still in the sense of stopped in time, but still in the way that time itself can viewed as a static object, composed of already predestined movements and changes of state and having neither a beginning nor an end.

Pollock seems to paint with the very nature of light and time, the drips and resulting beautiful and haunting abstract forms are a comparatively simple by-product. Pollocks genius is that he restrained himself from forming anything approaching a definite image. He leaves the canvass at maximum load, so perfectly charged with potential forms that in viewing his work I sometimes feel I am standing quivering on the threshold between being and nothingness.

Yes, just as in the Emporer's clothes the viewer seems to impose the design of their own needs and logic we see something in it because it would be in some way 'cool' to see that something, but here there really is a set of invible clothes to be 'seen'. Yes, "The King is in his altogether", but what an altogether the King is in. Art should make us see that which we otherwise cannot, Pollock enables us to see what we are not habituated to seeing and if we can alow ourselves to stand back and look we see the Emporer in all his naked glory. If any boy should then shout 'look he's naked!' he will get a clip round the ear and sent to bed early without his supper."

hey ches,

long time no see..i did indeed see that he had passed..

here is a link for anyone interested in this artist

pollock

I'm sorry but I have seen examples of his work and footage of Pollock at work, canvas flat on the floor, dribbling paint out of a tin - dear, dear me, this is art? This is where art really does get it's head well and truly stuck up it's own a** and just becomes another dirty word. A Pollock would look right on the wall above Emin's rumpled bed.

No offence intended to anyone by this view point by the way. Free speech and all that

I know a lot of people who have the same reaction to Pollack. The thing is that Pollack's work is a lot more complicated than people think it is. People claim that thier 7 year old child can make a mess of paint on a canvas. Maybe he can but not like Pollack. If you have ever tried to create something that looks just as good, I think you would know where I am coming from. Unfortunately most people who say that Pollack's paintings are too simple, have never actually tried it. My english teacher once told me that they sent one of pollacks paintings under this one machine that detects the ratios of colors in a grid format. Supposedly the color ratios are so precise in each adjacent section, while the color progresses over the entire canvas.

But of course all of this is less important than what you think of as art. I once had to write a long essay on what I think the definition of art is so I don't think I could define it in a few sentences here. But a quick way to find out what your own view on art is, think about what comes to mind when some says the word art. Some people's definitions often include emotion or communication, which it appears that Pollack has little of both. I never really considered art to be definable with either. Mine is much more broad and I don't see how anything can be cut out entirely out of an already broad field.

It has been very easy to make these people to admit that Pollacks work, at least has a distinct sense of beauty. Well, isn't that all that matters in order to consider it art? Well, I consider a lot of ugly things art but when the creator is able to create a certain connection to the viewer that the viewer is able to have such a reaction.