Final Project:
Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)
James
HUMA 1315: Fine Arts Appreciation
16 March 2008
Final Project 2
Final Project:
Jackson Pollock’s Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)
Background information about the artist: Paul Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), presumably one of the greatest American painters of all time, was an abstract expressionist painter. “Abstract Expressionism is a painting style of the late 1940s and early 1950s, predominantly American, characterized by its rendering of expressive content or abstract or nonobjective means” (A World of Art). He began to study painting in 1929 at the Art Students' League, New York, under the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. During the 1930s he worked in the manner of the Regionalists, being influenced also by the Mexican muralist painters (Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros) and by certain aspects of Surrealism. (JacksonPollock.com) “Surrealism is a style of art of the early 20th century that emphasized dream imagery, chance operations, and rapid, thoughtless forms of notation that expressed, it was felt, the unconscious mind” (A World of Art). From 1938 to 1942 he worked for the Federal Art Project. By the mid 1940s he was painting in a completely abstract manner, and the `drip and splash' style for which he is best known emerged with some abruptness in 1947. (JacksonPollock.com) “ Abstract, in art, is the rendering of images and objects in a stylized or simplified way, so that though they remain recognizable, their formal or expressive aspects are emphasized” (A World of Art). Instead of using the traditional easel he affixed his canvas to the floor or the wall and poured and dripped his paint from a can; instead of using brushes he manipulated it with `sticks, trowels or knives' (to use his own words), sometimes obtaining a heavy impasto by an admixture of