The Pollock's Mug - Number 4 - Art Mug Series

Art mug inspired by a famous Jackson Pollock painting. Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his "drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface, enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was also called all-over painting and action painting, since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style. Drawing is line, thus in June 1951 Pollock wrote to his friend and fellow-painter Alfonso Ossorio, "I've had a period of drawing on canvas with some of my old images coming through," referring to the figurative black-and-white canvases of that year, for instance Echo (CR 345*). Since another friend, the sculptor Tony Smith, had said that Pollock was particularly obsessed with drawing in the early 3 fifties, his use of the term "drawing" for these canvases can be assumed to refer to the primarily graphic execution— that is, the linear skeining, soaking, and puddling of black paint into the raw white canvas. There the shiny, virtually contin uous paint skin of previous work gives way to line against ground, and to some extent to the figuration of a number of these canvases in which figurative delineation— "contour drawing"— although radically transformed, returns to the work. In January 1951 Pollock had also written to Ossorio, "I've been doing some drawings on rice paper and feel good about 6 them," referring to the fifties works on Japan paper. Then later in 1951 he began some drawings on Mulberry paper, some of them more coloristic— more painterly— than those on canvas. So there seems to be, for Pollock, a continuous notion of the traditional idea of drawing as being small in scale and something done on paper. By the spring of 1951 Pollock was "drawing" by pouring paint into a raw canvas ground, "drawing" in black and white abstractly and figuratively, in a large size. He was also drawing on paper in a smaller size, pouring ink, using colour, working abstractly and figuratively —in fact, covering the whole range of possible notions about drawing, while incorporating tradition into his own inventions. What is signifi cant in terms of his work is that it represents a continuous organic whole in which opposites are in a constant process of being synthesized, reexamined, and resynthesized. Pollock is primarily an artist whose conception of form is linear. His mature style was formed out of an obsessive preoc cupation with line— with drawing on any level — that led to a radical synthesis of drawing and paint ing, first in the winter of 1946-47, when it was manifestly about painting, and again, on different terms, in the winter of 1950-51, when his preoc cupation with drawing itself dominated. This repre sented a new synthesis in twentieth-century art. Even prior to 1946-47 Pollock's work had been graphic in conception; his mythological and symbolic subjects were rendered graphically. Never theless he had, as well, an extraordinary painterly sensibility. In the early work an essentially linear conception and a desire for expansive, nonspecific space battled with an equally strong desire for volume and surface, for painterliness— impasto. These paintings strive for seemingly irreconcilable effects of those modes in which line and local tone are primary and those in which the effect is painterly. They pursue both Ingres and Delacroix, as well as El Greco and the Picasso of Guernica. As Pollock's work developed in the forties he delineated form increasingly by squeezing and scumbling paint onto the surface of the canvas in a heavy impasto of flat, coloristic "dapple." Concerned with figuration (and with volume), but equally concerned with the twodimensional picture plane and space, he reconciled the two by painting flatter areas between the open linear figures, creating an interchange of figure/ ground relationships— in effect reversing the usual figure/ground relationship (reinforced by physical overpainting of areas of grey around figures in some of the works, a device for reconciling surface and volume). Space and figure interchange as positive and negatives determined by line, creating a situa tion in which the figuration appears to be "unstable" 7 and in which "form begets form." These paintings are always finally resolved by drawing. The lines, whether drawn with the brush or with paint squeezed directly from the tube, whether figures or simply linear parts of coloristic accents, are tied together graphically across an insistently painterly two-dimensional surface. A reclusive and volatile personality, Pollock struggled with alcoholism for most of his life. In 1945, he married the artist Lee Krasner, who became an important influence on his career and on his legacy. Pollock died at the age of 44 in an alcohol-related single-car accident when he was driving. In December 1956, four months after his death, Pollock was given a memorial retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City. A larger, more comprehensive exhibition of his work was held there in 1967. In 1998 and 1999, his work was honoured with large-scale retrospective exhibitions at MoMA and at The Tate in London.