Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.
Jackson PollockRead
On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.
Interpretation
The artist finds a deeper connection to their work by physically interacting with it from all angles.
In this quote, Jackson Pollock expresses his approach to painting, highlighting how being on the floor allows him to immerse himself in the artwork. This physical proximity enables him to engage with the painting more intimately, as it facilitates a 360-degree perspective that enhances his creative process and connection to his art.
In practice
During an art class, I quoted Pollock to encourage students to physically engage with their canvases.
Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.
I don't paint nature. I am nature.
I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.
He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.
My painting does not come from the easel.
I've been thinking of death a lot, and I am amazed by its inevitability, frightened, as we all are, of the totally unknown, and yet feel a long sleep is somehow earned by those of us who live on the edge.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself . . . with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.
Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.
All the charming and beautiful things, from the Song of Songs, to bouillabaisse, and from the nine Beethoven symphonies to the Martini cocktail, have been given to humanity by men who, when the hour came, turned from tap water to something with color in it, and more in it than mere oxygen and hydrogen.
Writing is the delicate, difficult, and dangerous means of succeeding in avowing the unavowable.
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.