Creation of Chaos Essay

Paul Jackson Pollock is a famous American artist, the ideologist and leader of the abstract expressionism who made a profound impact on the arts of the second part of the 20^th century. His early works were essentially influenced by Mexican artists, but after he got acquainted with the works of Pablo Picasso and surrealists he turned more to symbolism. In 1947 Pollock introduced his revolutionary technique of dropping. He starts to work with huge canvases spread over the floor and splitting paints from brushes without touching the surface.

Actually liquid painting was known to Pollock since he observed it operated by David Siqueiros, the Mexican muralist, in New York City workshop in 1936 and practiced it 1940s. In his studio Pollock refused traditional artist’s paints and used household paints ”“ alkyd enamels considering them “a natural growth out of a need” (Naifeh & Smith, 1989). His instruments were hard brushes, trowels, sticks, knives and syringes, and while in the process of work he implied different parts of his body. For this drip technique the artist was even called “Jack the Dripper”. Moreover, he often performed thick impasto with sand or broken glass, and this is referred as a start of action painting (Herskovic, 2000).

The technique introduced by Pollock is a kind of new art. The way he moved during the process of painting was often compared with dancing, so it was a combination of visual arts, plastic arts and drama preformed by various tools under the power of Pollock’s inspiration.

His style of work is true passion of human body free of thoughts and ideas: “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”¦ 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,” Jackson Pollock commented on his creativity (Naifeh & Smith, 1989). In the Convergence we see how this lines and elements bind together. This is an image not to be perceived rationally, this is a new level of contact with supernatural and subconscious forces ruling us. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The big moment came when it was decided to paint ”˜just to paint.’ The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value ”“ political, aesthetic, moral”, Harold Rosenberg wrote in his 1952 article (Herskovic, 2000). So the artist is no more restricted by ideology or standards, and therefore by borders of time and space. Iement Greenberg describes the history of art as a continuous liberation and formal purification and within this view he saw Pollock’s painting as the best work of the day and the peak of the Western tradition (Herskovic, 2000). Besides, Pollock’s paintings present cooperation of the arts with science, as they are often recognized as demonstration of mathematical chaos.

The Convergence can be widely criticized for absurd and absence of comprehensible story, called “a joke in bad taste” or professionally executed wallpaper, but nevertheless it is a terrific and eloquent reflection of the reality of the 20^th century with its total disillusion and overall revision of the world, of a man in this world and of course art as a way of its interpretation.