A Pollock Discussion

When I was watching a movie today about Jackson Pollock, I noticed he painted when he was very angry. And I also noticed that made me feel uncomfortable, and I went into drawing when I felt uncomfortable. They say that painting and drawing are ways of expressing ones own emotions, but could it not be that they are more the escape as opposed to the answer.

Jackson Pollock was a wonderful artist, and painted very abstract expressionist work. He played with cubism, and surreal abstract work, but in the end came to a very automatist style of painting. He focused inwards with his work. Someone noticed one could not but paint from nature, and yet here he was painting from within, Pollock stated quite simply "I am nature". One is nature. Yet, your view of nature comes only from within. So in the end, the painter only ever paints them self.

Pollock was a severely depressed man, and an alcoholic. He painted from within, and painted all this out. When he was frustrated, depressed, drunk or angry he would paint this into his work. But he seemed to not focus what was going on within, but projecting it into his painting. Putting the pain outside of himself. When he was drunk, he would get angry and push the anger outside of himself, either at his lover, his family, things in his immediate environment, he would project.

People see art as a way of dealing with problems. And I believe it can help, but if you put everything into your art, you are only projecting. Putting your feelings into something outside of yourself, and to put it into an extreme like Pollock is something unhealthy. There should be no mistake that art is a way to solve your problems within. It can help to understand, to look at, and to analyze them, but in the end it does not help them, it does not fix them and it does not heal them. Art is something you look at. All it can do is let you look at what it is you feel.

When I feel uncomfortable, I will sketch, I will draw, and I will distract myself from this feeling. But to use art as habitual distraction is not constructive. I feel that art should be seen as not a form of healing, but expression alone. For an artist can do no more than a self-portrait.