g a whole new way of painting that he had never tried before and his paintings were starting to look totally different from before. Jackson also started action paintings, which are paintings that are abstract, but get the word action from the way they are made. In 1947 Pollock produced his first totally abstract “drip” painting. Jackson usually laid out large canvas and stood over them dribbling paint in wide arcs or straight lines or any way he thought to be fit. “If you want to look at a face”, said Pollock in 1949, “look at one.” “On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in it, work from the four sides and be literally ‘in;’ the painting.”—Jackson Pollock, 1947. This made time magazine give him the nickname, “Jack the Dripper” in 1956. Pollock’s paintings usually go against the majority of paintings by not having a focal point so that the dribbled paintings can be looked at as a whole. When Pollock developed his “action” paintings, he was influenced by Surrealist ideas of “psychic automatism”, which is direct expression of the unconscious. Due to alcoholism, Jackson had an unhappy personal life. In 1945, Jackson bought a farmhouse and finally married his girlfriend Lee Krasner. Lee was an abstract artist as well and she used one of the bedrooms as a studio while Jackson resided his work in the barn. It wasn’t till Jackson died till Lee’s work began getting some recognition. During the 1950’s Pollock continued to paint figurative or semi-figurative black and white works. Jackson Pollock died in a 1956 car crash caused by drunk driving at a premature age of 44. He died alongside Beat novelist Jack Kerouac and actor James Dean and was labeled one of the 50’s rebels. That gruesome death gave the Abstract Expressionist movemen...
