Australian Travel

An American painter who led Abstract Expressionism, an art movement characterized by the free-associative gestures in paint sometimes known as “action painting.” Through his lifetime he received widespread commentary and serious acknowledgement for the modern “poured” or “drip” technique he mastered to create his major paintings. From his contemporaries, he was acknowledged for his exceptionally personal and totally uncompromising dedication to the art. His work had exceptional impact on other artists of the time and on numerous following art movements in America. He was also one of the first American painters to be honoured in his living years and after his passing as a peer of 20th-century European fathers in modern art.

Early life and work
Paul Jackson Pollock was the fifth and youngest son of Stella May McClure and LeRoy Pollock, who were both of Scotch-Irish extraction (LeRoy’s surname was originally was McCoy prior to his adoption about 1890 by the Pollocks) and he was born and raised in Iowa. The family left Cody, Wyoming, eleven months after Jackson’s birth; he would know Cody only from photographs. During the following sixteen years the Pollock family lived in California and Arizona, while relocating nine times. In 1928 the family moved to Los Angeles, where Jackson Pollock enrolled at the Manual Arts High School. At school he came under the influence of Frederick John de St. Vrain Schwankovsky, a painter and illustrator who was a member of the Theosophical Society, a sect that promoted metaphysical and occult spirituality. Schwankovsky taught Pollock some rudimentary lessons in drawing and painting, introduced him to superior currents of European contemporary art, and encouraged his passion in theosophical pieces. At the time, Pollock - who had been raised as an agnostic - also went to the camp meetings of the first messiah of the theosophists, Jiddu Krishnamurti, who was a personal friend of Schwankovsky. These spiritual explorations permitted him to understand the concepts of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and the utilization of unconscious imagery in his pieces in the following years.

In the 1930 fall Pollock followed his brother Charles who in 1922 had left home to study art in New York City, enrolled with the Art Students League under his brother’s teacher, the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. (Jackson neglected his birth name, Paul, around the time he went to New York in 1930.) He studied life drawing, painting, and composition with Benton for the following two and one-half years, leaving the school in the early months of 1933. For the subsequent two years Pollock lived in poverty, at first with Charles and, by the fall of 1934, with his brother Sanford. He went on to share an apartment in Greenwich Village with Sanford and his wife until 1942.

Pollock was employed by the WPA Federal Art Project in the fall of 1935 as an easel painter. This employment granted him economic security in the last years of the Great Depression as well as the time to progress his art. From his years with Benton until 1938, Pollock’s painting was highly shaped by the compositional methods and regionalist subject matter of his teacher and by the lyrically expressionist vision of the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. It consisted a majority of small landscapes and figurative scenes for example Going West (1934–35), in which Pollock employed motifs borrowed from photos of his birthplace at Cody.

In 1937 Pollock began psychiatric treatment for alcoholism, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1938, which caused him to be institutionalized for about four months. After these experiences, his work became semiabstract and showed the assimilation of motifs from the modern Spanish artists Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, as well as the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco. Jungian symbolism and the Surrealist exploration of the unconscious also influenced his works of this period; indeed, from 1939 through 1941 he was in treatment with two successive Jungian psychoanalysts who used Pollock’s own drawings in the therapy sessions.

If you are looking for a large range of watercolour paints try Discount Art Warehouse. Watercolor paint is a great medium for young and mature artists alike. You will be amazed at our range of watercolor paints. We also have an extensive range of brushes to suit.