Jackson Pollock Quotes

Most modern painters work from a different source. They work from within.

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

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.

When we discovered cubism, we did not have the aim of discovering cubism. We only wanted to express what was in us.

I start out making my paintings for me. I don't see it as a form of communication. Until, of course, after they are done and I want people to see them. And want them to be recognized. But while I am making them I just try to get lost in them. Kind of like it's a prayer.

The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by Rachel.

The artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him. If, however, he sees nothing within him, then he should also refrain from painting that which he sees before him. Otherwise, his pictures will be like those folding screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or the dead.

Since childhood, I have been painting, for no special reason, numerous dots and nets, drawing from the hallucinations that seem to appear endlessly. I can't explain why if you ask me.

I only feel, but want the power to paint.

I'm not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I'm much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing.

Without the gods, how would I sing?' I asked. With your own voice,' he said.

A vivid thought brings the power to paint it; and in proportion to the depth of its source is the force of its projection.

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.

Everyday's a good day when you paint

I arrived on earth in 1928. Born into a milieu of painters, I acquired my taste for painting with my mother's milk.

Abstract expression is so solid, so successful and recognizable, but there's a mystery about the artists that goes into it, a fetishism about the artists themselves and who they were.

A painting is not a picture of an experience, but is the experience.

Maybe I was a little jealous or envious of the abstract painters - but the truth was I thought what they were doing was boring.

I come alive when I'm painting. I like to work in oils and acrylics, and the full sensory engagement and self-expression is very stimulating to me.

I use color in a completely arbitrary way in order to express myself powerfully.

Whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

The most interesting painting is one that expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

I paint not the things I see but the feelings they arouse in me.