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.
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.
In the past 10 years, I've looked at life as this Pollock stuff. And now I'm almost in the post Pollock phase.
And that Newman wasn't, and yet to me Pollock is just as radical and unlike Expressionism as Newman.
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.
Pollock really invented something. No one painted like him - or de Kooning or Still.
I'm interested in Jackson Pollock's kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it's nothing, and yet it's incredible.
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!
Mark Grotjahn's large new paintings abound with torrents of ropy impasto, laid down in thickets, cascading waves, and bundles that swell, braid around, or overlap one another.
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.'
Pollock also... wanted one to be wrapped in the painting.
And also the new excitement and variety of ways that the abstract expressionists were applying paint. You could put it on as though it were colored air and it would be painting.
I was not an Abstract Expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible.
