Jackson Pollock Quotes

My painting does not come from the easel.

People have always frightened and bored me consequently I have been within my own shell.

I want to express my feelings, not illustrate them.

Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

The pictures I contemplate painting would constitute a halfway state and attempt to point out the direction of the future - without arriving there completely

Art is coming face to face with yourself.

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.

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

Well, painting today certainly seems very vibrant, very alive, very exiting. Five or six of my contemporaries around New York are doing very vital work, and the direction that painting seems to be taken here - is - away from the easel - into some sort, some kind of wall, wall painting ...

When I'm painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It's only after a get acquainted period that I see what I've been about. I've no fears about making changes for the painting has a life of its own.

When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing.

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.

I don't paint nature. I am nature.

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 had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

Bums are the well-to-do of this day. They didn't have as far to fall.

A real friend is someone you say a sentence to and they know ten thousand words behind that sentence.

I can control the flow of paint: there is no accident.

There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.

A canvas is an arena in which to act.

The modern artist ... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

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 don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final 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.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

The idea of an isolated American painting , so popular in this country during the thirties, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd ... And in another sense, the problem doesn't exist at all; or, if it did, would solve itself: An American is an American and his painting would naturally be qualified by the fact, whether he wills or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of any one country.

I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.

Painting is a state of being.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

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

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.

Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him. I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques, which seems a little strange at the moment, but I don't think there's anything very different about it. I paint on the floor and this isn't unusual - the Orientals did that.

The process is only a means to an end-creating the painting I want. It doesn't mean anything itself. It's only a way of creating a result.

Every good painter paints what he is.

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

If people would just look at the paintings, I don't think they would have any trouble enjoying them. It's like looking at a bed of flowers, you don't tear your hair out over what it means.