Word: pollock
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Middens of Mythology. "He didn't have a logical mind," said Thomas Hart Benton, who was Pollock's teacher at Manhattan's Art Students League from 1929 to 1931, "but he was a very fine colorist." Perhaps he learned his color and texture from the land, when, he worked as a surveyor's helper; in any case, he learned drawing from anatomy up. He borrowed Benton's feel for the swirly sensuousness of oils, turned to the writhing images of the Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco, loved the sinuous drapery of baroque...
...What Pollock missed in logic, he made up in intuition. Surrealism excited him in its reliance on the unconscious, and he underwent Jungian analysis in 1939 to unearth the middens of mythology stored in his mind...
Neon Phalanx. Rejecting the scientific color of the French impressionists, even the acid color of the German expressionists, Pollock explored a clattering spectrum, an American neon intensity of pigments. He used fast-drying enamels, and aluminum paint to produce higher highlights than white could yield. He hit upon the idea that the paint could be the image, not just serve as its representative. He rejected the notion that paintings should have visual climaxes that smack the eye-such as a Mona Lisa in the midst of a landscape -and instead made every square inch of his big works bear...
...Pollock inverted traditional perspective. Instead of a vanishing point, his paintings advance like a phalanx, enmeshing and engulfing the eye beyond peripheral vision-like CinemaScope. But Pollock believed that art was more than communication-an idea that led him in conversation to emphasize the act of painting more than the outcome. This, in turn, led Critic Harold Rosenberg to dub his style "action painting" -and the phrase stuck...
...Pollock strewed oils about, but nothing was an accident. If it was, he cleaned it up. He danced around, and even on top of, his work. In later years, he called his canvases "the arena," a flatland where he encountered himself in a battle between mind and hand, He improvised like a jazz musician, scattering paint off the tip of an overloaded brush in the whiplash rhythm of his choreography. Sometimes he added sand and broken glass for texture. "It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess," he said in 1947. "Otherwise...