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...the huge Jackson Pollock canvas that is the U.S.A.: vast, murky, splotched and slapped together by a drunk.

 

Sarah Vowell

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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."

 

Jackson Pollock

 

It’s (painting like this – you are in front of your canvas, your hands holds the painting, ready, raised. The canvas waits, waits, empty and white – but all the time it knows what it wants. So – what does it want, anyway? My hand comes near, my eyes begin to transform the waiting canvas; and when – with my hand holding the paint and my eyes seeing the forms – I touch the canvas, it trembles, it comes to life. The struggle begins, to harmonize canvas, eye, hand forms. New apparitions stalk the earth, c. 1953

 

Karel Appel

 

My teacher Stefan Wolpe was a Marxist and he felt my music was too esoteric at the time. And he had his studio on a proletarian street, on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. . . . He was on the second floor and we were looking out the window, and he said, "What about the man on the street?" At that moment . . . Jackson Pollock was crossing the street.

 

Morton Feldman

 

Michael Jackson? That's all I gotta say. ...He's become a punchline. He has! Michael Jackson is a punchline. To any joke you want. If you ever forget the punchline to a joke, just say 'Michael Jackson.' "Two Jews walk into a bar...Michael Jackson!" "Why did the chicken cross the road? Michael Jackson!" "So the farmer brings his daughter to the dinner table--Michael Jackson!" It works for f**king anything!

 

Lewis Black

 

Right up until today (16 years after his death in 1956, ed.) Pollock takes a lot of mine time... ...and while you ask ’How much did it take out of me as a creative artist’ I ask simultaneously, ‘What did it give?’ It is a two-way affair at all times. I would give anything to have someone giving me what I was able to give Pollock.

 

Lee Krasner