![]() Pollock, “My Painting,” Possibilities, New York, Winter, 1947-1948).Įmulating the techniques of the Navajo Indian sand painters that Pollock had known as a child, the placing of his canvas on the ground made a surprising degree of difference to Pollock’s working practice. “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting” (J. “On the floor I am more at ease,” he later said. Central to the development of his painting, in respect of these works, was his decision around 1946 to begin painting his works on the floor. In his early experiments of 1943 Pollock had, following the spirit of automatism then common amongst many Surrealist and avant-garde American painters, briefly explored a pouring technique with the aim of freeing further the code-like figurative calligraphy that both distinguished and often overlay his work of this period. Pollock had first begun to experiment with the pouring and dripping of paint in his work around 1943, but it was not until 1947 that he made the all-important break from applying paint directly onto the canvas plane to create completely freeform works composed solely of a complex veil-like surface of drips, splashes and spills made from above. Clark, “Pollock’s Smallness,” in ibid., p. “There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or end,” Pollock once recalled, “He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was.” (J. Indeed, Pollock reveled in this new way of painting and its ambiguous reception by critics of the art establishment. He is not drawing on the canvas so much as in the air above it” (H. Hans Namuth, the photographer who documented Pollock’s working practice, recounted the artist would, “take his stick or brush out of the paint can and then, in a cursive sweep, pass it over the canvas high above it, so that the viscous paint would form trailing patterns which hover over the canvas before they settle upon it, and then fall into it and then leave a trace of their own passage. As the artist’s wife, the painter Lee Krasner recalled, Pollock’s radical new technique of painting was primarily a way of “working in the air ‘gesturally creating’ aerial forms which then landed” (L. Composition with Red Strokes is a testament to Pollock’s abilities that this seemingly automatic application of paint is in fact very deliberate and precise. These seemingly contradictory elements-bold and brash yet at the same time delicate and refined-collide but never clash. The agitation of Pollock’s constantly moving hand is traced throughout the surface of the work, as lace-like trails of pigment coexist alongside more substantial passages of thick white impasto together in a delicate yet deliberate dance. ![]() ![]() ![]() The fluid lines of chromatic brilliance that dance across the surface of Composition with Red Strokes are a physical manifestation of the artist at the height of his creative authority. Indeed, Composition with Red Strokes stages an unrivalled drama that is remarkable for its intimate proportions and attests to the artist’s supreme ability to create alternate worlds distinct to themselves. Ever the impresario, Pollock orchestrated painterly energy from above his floor-tacked surfaces, drawing in mid-air with paint-laden sticks and hardened brushes in a way that remarkably cohered towards an all-over unity of cosmic proportions. While Pollock’s signature prowess of 1950 had largely been realized in the genesis of some of his largest works, here Pollock resorted to the challenge of an easel format-trading in balletic full-arm gestures for the delicate choreography of the wrist. One: Number 31, 1950, Museum of Modern Art, New York Number 32, 1950, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Number 27, 1950, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Conceived during the apex of the artist’s career, 1950 witnessed the genesis of some of the most defining paintings of Jackson Pollock’s oeuvre.Īlong with Composition with Red Strokes, the iconic works of this period include such masterpieces as: A utumn Rhythm (Number 30), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Number One, 1950 (Lavender Mist), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Composed of a myriad of interlaced swirls and streaks of vibrant color that weaves a constantly moving, almost evolving, complex pattern of painterly form and energy, Composition with Red Strokes is a seemingly complete world unto itself-a self-contained cosmos of painterly rhythm.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |