EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Jackson Pollock’s Poetry of the Self

“Painting is a state-of-being….Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.” Jackson Pollock (1912-56)¹

Like hundreds of artists since the early Renaissance, and probably from even before then,  the true meaning of Jackson Pollock’s paintings is not made apparent for the average art lover because, like difficult poetry and even Christ’s teachings, it is hidden from the masses behind the colorful and appealing pattern on the surface. Pollock’s paintings depict a mental image inside his own mind. His words above suggest it; at the very least they confirm that the artist not only looked inwards in line with earlier art but was on the same journey himself as other artists. He aimed to discover that essence in him that made him human, the essence we all share with each other and with nature and which earlier generations had called “divine.” It was his journey and that of his art which, by showing the way to a perceptive few, helps others along a similar route to a similar goal.

Perhaps that is why Richard Taylor, a scientist, was able to discover in Pollock’s paintings a consistent fractal pattern, which is to say a constant rhythm between light and dark in his drip-paintings.² Fractals are self-similar patterns which contain in a small section the same ratio between light and dark, or between form and background, that is found in the whole. In nature it reveals itself in the twig as in the tree; in a small splash as a wave; in the leaves of grass on a golfer’s divot as in the green as a whole. 

This self-similar pattern in nature not only repeated itself in Pollock’s paintings as he moved his whole body around the canvas on the floor but he appears to have encouraged it. The rhythm breaks down towards the edges of his paintings, a problem he reportedly tried to avoid in his later works by spreading the complex of drips as close as possible to the frame. Yet fractals and the fractal pattern in nature was not discovered until years after the artist’s death. Thus Pollock who actively searched for what was true inside himself must have found truth in nature through instinct and contemplation alone.

As interesting as it is to know that Pollock’s masterpieces share their pattern with nature, even with approximately the same value as in many of nature’s forms, it is equally fascinating that the drip-paintings of Pollock’s many imitators do not contain this fundamental characteristic, self-similarity. 

It has been noted as well that not all of Pollock’s compositions are quite as abstract as they seem. His late ones have been described as “self-referential in the extreme.”³ Many appear to have started around some portion of the human form and then been disguised, a tactic reminiscent of how Michelangelo formed the core of the Last Judgement out of the unseen head of Dante. Paintings by Pollock are often based on heads and even his own self-portrait. Thus, though we all generally see the same surface pattern, only persistent and perceptive viewers will see the image from which it sprung in the more abstract compositions. Lee Krasner, an artist and Pollock’s wife, reported years later: “I saw his paintings evolve. Many of them, many of the most abstract, began with more or less recognizable imagery – heads, parts of the body, fantastic creatures. Once I asked Jackson why he didn’t stop the painting when a given image was exposed” and he replied: “I choose to veil the imagery.”⁴

One critic remarked “Pollock's magic as a painter is in his refusal to acknowledge a gulf between his painting and himself. He spoke of being ‘in my painting’. His abstract art is not of the rational, ordering mind but of the entire self.”⁵

1. Erika Doss, Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (University of Chicago Press) 1995, p. 353

2. Richard P. Taylor, “Order in Pollock’s Chaos”, Scientific American 287, Dec. 2002, pp. 116-21; Taylor's use of fractals to authenticate forgeries or Pollock imitators in a specific case has been challenged for the size of the sections chosen, not for his assertion that Pollocks' paintings are fractal.

3. Jonathan Jones, "Portrait and a Dream, Jackson Pollock (1953)", The Guardian, 4th July 2003, online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2003/jul/05/art

4. Brydon Smith, “Jackson Pollock (1912-1956): Abstracting over the Figure”, National Gallery of Canada Review 3, 2002, pp. 29-38

5. See note 3