Outcome

For this assignment I researched Jackson Pollock, an abstract expressionist from the mid 1900s. He is most well known for his drip paintings. For this style, Pollock would place a large canvas on the floor or against the wall and walk around it, dripping paint from a paint can. He would tend not to use brushes, choosing instead knives or sticks. Pollock used house paints and tended to use the entire canvas. Sometimes he would add sand and broken glass to his works. The sand in particular is reminiscent of Native American art. Pollock’s style of painting is very physical and very emotional; it is like surrealism in that it involves the unconscious, but it is also very controlled.

Work:

I chose to focus on Lavender Mist, also known as Number 1, 1950. It seems to display Pollock’s drip style of painting very well. It consists mainly of six colors (a muted yellow, a pale orange, a dark teal, a bluish-gray, white, and black) splattered around the canvas, covering the entire thing. In the very right edge there is one spot of red. In the upper-right of the painting there is a handprint, but otherwise the work is crisscrossing lines of paint that suggest excessive movement.

Response:

The main message I get from this painting is that it involves a lot of movement to create. I also notice that there is a distinct layering of the colors: the yellow paint seems to be the base with the black lines making up the very top layer. This suggests to me order, even though the lines themselves appear very chaotic.

Product:

In order to recreate Pollock’s work, I used a Wacom tablet and Photoshop. I actually ended up attempting the recreation twice within the hour because I didn’t feel that I was capturing Pollock’s style. In both attempts I tried varying the brush style, but in the end I still don’t feel that I was successful.

Since I could not figure out a way to recreate Pollock’s defining style, I chose to focus on other aspects of his work in my recreation. First, the obvious: I used the same color palette and the same wild motions to draw lines on the tablet. Pollock’s process involves him walking around his canvas, and I chose to imitate that by occasionally rotating the tablet so that no one direction was the top. Furthermore, I imitated the layers of colors in Pollock’s work. That is, once I finished with one color, I didn’t go back to using a previously used color. Finally, since Pollock’s work was driven by emotion, I attempted to amplify my emotions by listening to music while I was working on part of the first and the second attempt.

Reflection:

Through this assignment I learned that there is some randomness in Pollock’s art that just cannot be captured digitally using a drawing tablet. I think that a better way of capturing Pollock’s style digitally would use something like a Wii or a Kinect, where one’s whole body movements can be transferred to a digital canvas. Using a small tablet on Photoshop just didn’t work out.

Although I do think that using the tablet was better than simply using my laptop, I do not think I was able to capture Pollock’s style in my work. I say this because Pollock’s style involves splattering paint, something that I could not do in Photoshop. Similarly, Pollock is known for laying large pieces of canvas on the ground to create his works. All I had was a relatively small tablet.

Sources:

http://www.jackson-pollock.org/

http://www.nga.gov/feature/pollock/

http://phlearn.com/create-splatters-of-paint-with-custom-brush-settings-in-photoshop