Jackson Pollock as an Influential America Artist

The painter Jackson Pollock was an influential America painter and a key person to the abstract expressionist movement. He was born in Cody , Wyoming in 1912 and he was the youngest of 5 brothers. He grew up in Arizona and Chico, California he moved nine times in his first 17 years of his life. Stella may McClure and Leroy Pollock were are his parents and pollocks father attained the last name pollock from his parents neighbors when he was a boy because both of his parents died and his neighbors adopted him. When he was older He went to Los Angeles manual arts high school where he learned from John Schwankovsky who trained him to draw and paint and introduced him to European modern art. Which he got expelled from and was also expelled from the next high school he went to and this shows that he liked getting into trouble. He had an unpredictable personality and was an alcoholic at a very young age and struggled with alcoholism throughout his entire life.

In 1930 he and his brother Charles moved to new York to study art with Hart Benton at the art students league of New York. Hart Benton had an influence on pollocks works and helped him to put a steady motion into his artwork and independence in the way he painted. During this time was the great depression and pollock was in poverty and had to move in with his other brother and his wife to make sure he could survive. In 1935 he was employed by the WPA federal art project working as an easel painter and this was his way of staying out of poverty during the great depression and this opportunity also let him develop his own style of painting.

His problems with drinking would continue and He tried to stop being an alcoholic by undergoing Jungian psychotherapy with Dr. Joseph Henderson and Dr. Violet Staub de Laszlo from 1938-1942. Jungian psychotherapy is a method of therapy to make the conscious and unconscious mind come together and make the patient feel more stable in their emotions. It also makes the patient look at themselves in a deeper way and look at their self that they don’t show other people to help balance themselves Dr. Henderson had pollock make drawing to help him in a therapeutic way and many of his drawing ended up influencing his paintings. 

Through Dr. Henderson’s observations of pollock he believed that he was bipolar. In 1936 pollock was introduced to liquid paints by a Mexican muralist named David Alfaro Siqueiros in a studio in new York not too far from where he lived. By 1940 he began to use his paint pouring in his paintings which would be the beginning of his use of his signature look. He then moved to the Springs where he started to lay the paintings on the ground and dripping the paint onto the canvas. He called this technique the drip technique. 

Throughout his constant use of the drip painting he switched the type of paint to a more common and accessible house paint. His method of dispersing the paint changed which lead to him creating these masterpieces using various tools to spread or drip the paint. He used brushes, sticks, and even turkey basters to splatter, smear, or drip the paint. He is thought to be one of the main origins of action painting. His new form of painting was a completely new form of painting from the traditional way that would be completely upright and only using a brush to paint the pictures.

In October 1945 he married an American painter Lee Krasner and moved in together in a house on long island. At that house they both made studios so that they both could create works of art of their own. One of the influences that would have been influential to Pollocks drip style would have been Janet Sobel a Ukrainian American. She had her paintings being shown at the art of the Century gallery where Pollock would have been able to see the painting