Jackson Pollock Quotes - Page 2

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.

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

My concern is with the rhythms of nature I work inside out, like nature.

Today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

I want to express my feelings, not illustrate them.

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age we’re living in. All cultures have had means and techniques of expressing their immediate aims – the Chinese, the Renaissance, all cultures. The thing that interests me is that today painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves. Most modern painters work from a different source, they work from within.

It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age find its own technique.

In response to the question, 'How do you know when you're finished?' Pollock replied, 'How do you know when you're finished making love?

I've been thinking of death a lot, and I am amazed by its inevitability, frightened, as we all are, of the totally unknown, and yet feel a long sleep is somehow earned by those of us who live on the edge.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc. I prefer sticks, trowels, knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass or other foreign matter added.

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.

I don't use the accident - 'cause I deny the accident

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

A man's life is his work; his work is his life.

It [abstract art] should be enjoyed just as music is enjoyed after a while you may like it or you may not.

With experience it seems to be possible to control the flow of paint, to a great extent, and I don't use - I don't use the accident - 'cause I deny the accident... it's quite different from working, say, from a still life where you set up objects and work directly from them. I do have a general notion of what I'm about and what the results will be. I approach painting in the same sense as one approaches drawing, that is, it's direct.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

I don't work from drawings and colour sketches into a final painting. Painting, I think, today - the more immediate, the more direct - the greater the possibilities of making a direct - of making a statement.

Every good painter paints what he is.

I do not paint nature. I am nature.