Action Painting Quotes

The history of American art, in a way, begins with Jackson Pollock and his big paintings. This theme of bigness - all painters and sculptors have dealt with it ever since.

Pollock was terrific. I think he freed himself of all kinds of worry about this world. Ran around and dripped, and then he managed to express ecstasy.

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.

Pollock looks unusual and radical even now.

In the past 10 years, I've looked at life as this Pollock stuff. And now I'm almost in the post Pollock phase.

Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product, Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye, creating works of psychic and physical power.

And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.

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.

In the late 30s the name Pollock was totally unknown and unheard of.

Pollock was well known, certainly, but for all the wrong reasons. He was known as much for being wild and unconventional in his working methods as for being a great artist.

I'm interested in Jackson Pollock's kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it's nothing, and yet it's incredible.

Pollock really invented something. No one painted like him - or de Kooning or Still.

I'm inspired by Jackson Pollock; splashing layer upon layer, using different materials, experimenting with new methods to produce something fresh. I'd love to be able to create in this way!

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

In the '50s Morris Louis and I were not known, David Smith and Helen Frankenthaler were not much known.

Before they did all those shows on Jackson Pollock, I loved the way he formulated his paintings. I loved Basquiat - I was into the whole Beat generation, Kerouac, etc., and all those artists talked about that and Kerouac, so I just got in the middle of being spontaneous.

The New York action painters want their pictures to jump off the walls and chase you down the street.

It would have been the equivalent of Jackson Pollock's attempts to copy the Sistine Chapel.

I don't wake up in the morning and think about Franz Kline.

Actually, I love the Abstract Expressionists - or I like the ones I like, anyway.

Put a lot of paint & a wooden ball or other object on a board. Push to the other end of the board. Use this in a painting. - ruler on board.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

I love Francis Bacon. I just saw a great Jackson Pollock exhibit at the Dallas Museum when I was home for Thanksgiving.

I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'