27 Jackson Pollock Quotes

Jackson Pollock quotes

1. 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.

2. I am nature.

3. 'My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. 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.' -Quoted in 'Jackson Pollock: is he the greatest living painter in the United States?' LIFE 8 Aug. 1949: 42-45

4. Bill is a good painter but he's a French painter.

5. I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

6. I don't work from drawings or colour sketches... I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them... I can control the flow of paint, there is no accident, just as there is no beginning or no end.

7. Is this a painting?

8. My concern is with the rhythms of nature... I work inside out, like nature.

9. Painting is my whole life....

10. Something in me knows where I'm going, and - well, painting is a state of being.

11. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

12. When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of 'get acquainted' period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

13. Variant: I prefer to tack the canvas to the floor... I can walk around work from the four sides and literally be in the painting... this is akin to the method of the Indians and painters of the West.

14. He broke the ice for the rest of us.

15. A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor. ... There was complete silence. ... Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter. ... My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said 'This is it.'

1. If people would just look at the paintings, I don't think they would have any trouble enjoying them. It's like looking at a bed of flowers, you don't tear your hair out over what it means.

2. The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

3. He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

4. When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

5. I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.

6. The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

7. As to what I would like to be, it is difficult to say. An artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts.

8. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

9. The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.

10. Every good painter paints what he is.

11. Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.

12. With experience it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don't use - I don't use the accident - 'cause I deny the accident... it's quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them. I do have a general notion of what I'm about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it's direct.