Drip. Drip. Drip. SPLAT. Drip. Drip. SLATHER. Drip. Drip. SPLAT.
That’s the sound of Jackson Pollock, stick in hand in a barn-turned-studio on Long Island, drenching his canvas with paint for his latest masterpiece. We’ve all seen his iconic, messy paintings, but what about the man behind the mess?
Turns out his life was a mess, too. A tortured artist, Jackson Pollock was an abstract expressionist painter who worked prolifically from the 1930s through the 1950s.
His drip-painting style is uncanny and unmistakable.
Pollock is the artist of the fifth most expensive painting ever to be auctioned off – right behind Picasso, Rothko, Cézanne, and Gauguin. No. 5, 1948 sold for $163.8 million.
His technique was avant-garde and the tools he used unconventional, as he illustrates in an interview from Life magazine in 1949.
“My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. 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,” he told Life. “When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing. It is only after a sort of ‘get acquainted’ period that I see what I have been about. I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.”
Until Pollock, no one had used this approach before. There were like-minded abstract expressionists such as Wassily Kandinsky, but no one attacked the canvas like Pollock did.
Pollock’s canvasses mirrored his troubled life. Historians and psychiatrists have posthumously diagnosed the man as bipolar, citing his erratic behavior.
Pollock was known to have extreme depressive episodes in which he would stay in bed day and night. On the flipside, he would go into maniacal work tears, feeling totally inspired and painting for periods of twenty-four hours.
Like many of us who are bipolar, Jackson Pollock was also a raging alcoholic.
Drunken outbursts mired Pollock’s ruptured life. One night he ended up in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan after harassing a man with a dog and getting into a drunken brawl with him.
And in the summer of 1937, Pollock was arrested for drunkenness and disorderly conduct in Martha’s Vineyard after chasing some girls with a bicycle.
In Jackson Pollock: A Biography, author Deborah Solomon describes his unruly activity at the famed Cedar Tavern in New York City.
“Drunk, he teased, taunted, and bullied, and no one was spared his obnoxious behavior,” she writes. “Standing up front by the bar, with his customary double Scotch, Pollock would deliver a well-known monologue to the admirers clustered around him. ‘What are you involved with? What are you really involved with?’ he would ask belligerently, glaring at some hapless fellow and daring him to answer. ‘You’re all a bunch of horses’ asses!’”
In East Hampton, New York, on Long Island, where Pollock lived with his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, Pollock spent some of his last days at local bars and ended up in the police station at the end of the night for whatever drunken mischief he got into. One police blotter read “Found Jackson Pollock outside on sidewalk lying down,” notes the biography.
Self-destructive. Ill-tempered. Prolific. Brilliant. Jackson Pollock was all these things. It’s a pattern that can be noticed throughout the lives of bipolar artists throughout history from Edgar Allen Poe to Amy Winehouse to Vincent Van Gogh. Pollock died drunk – swerving off the road and speeding his car into a couple of elm trees in 1956. He was 44.
Jackson Pollock’s work is beautiful chaos on canvas. Only someone with a skittish bipolar mind – like Pollock – could have created such organized disheveled aesthetics. Had he not been bipolar – working 24 hour sprees when manic – I don’t know if we would’ve seen such greatness. As for the alcoholism, maybe he wouldn’t have been so depressed and unable to paint had he not drank so much. Alcohol is a depressant, and it’s quite possible it hindered Pollock’s determination to work. Bipolar or not. Alcoholic or not. Jackson Pollock’s creative output is indeed unfathomable. And something to be celebrated.
