Jackson Pollock (1912 – 1956)
One of the leading artists and an influential American painter in the Abstract Expressionist movement, together with Willem de Kooning.
Naturally, the result is the thing (in painting, fh) and it doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.
The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd... And in another sense, the problem doesn’t exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by the fact, whether he wills or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.
Most of the paint I use is a liquid, flowing kind of paint. The brushes I use are more a sticks rather than brushes – the brush doesn’t touch the surface on the canvas, it’s just above... [so] I am able to be more free and to have greater freedom and move about the canvas, with greater ease.
I don’t work from drawings and colour sketches into a final painting. Painting, I think, today – the more immediate, the more direct – the greater the possibilities of making a direct – of making a statement.
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 meant it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment. Only he didn’t know it.