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Hidden Images In The Art Of Jackson Pollock?
Method in his painterly madness
“Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.”
― Jackson Pollock“New needs need new techniques.”
― Jackson Pollock, Pollock; [the life and work of the artist]
Jackson Pollock, one of the titans of 20th century abstract expressionism, used a “drip technique”, in which he poured or splashed paint onto a horizontal surface. He used the force of his whole body and frenetic dance to enable him to view the work from all angles.
A serendipitous series of influences came together to guide Pollock to his mature style: years spent painting realist murals in the 1930s showed him the power of painting on a large scale; Surrealism suggested ways to describe the unconscious; and Cubism guided his understanding of picture space.
Troubled Queen 1945 (see above) is a masterful transitional work from the Regionalist figurative paintings of Pollock’s early years to the passionate “drip” paintings for which he is best known. However, new research, led by psychiatric professor Stephen M Stahl and his team, and published in CNS Spectrums by Cambridge University Press, suggest that Pollock's signature drips hide “camouflaged images” at the base of some of his most renowned paintings, such as Troubled Queen.
