User:Practicasyoga

Jackson Pollock's Convergence
From Jackson Pollock’s named to numbered ‘drip paintings’, through his all-black canvases, and back to color ones, gravity conveyed gesture passes through various stages of density in relation to ground. As Convergence swings back with weight and color, a semi-conscious ‘after-the-fact’ in the painting continuum emerges that seems to be absent from other Pollock works. Moreover, the experience in the threads of Convergence gives chronological clues into the range of Pollock’s painting methods and of his conscious state while painting.

Pollock used black as his primary structural tool in order to hold the ‘pour paintings’ together. Before Convergence, the black calligraphy only weaves below, above, and around sparks of color, falling into place in separate sessions (see Free Form through Lavender Mist). In Convergence, though, the impact of Pollock’s gesture extends both backwards and forwards in time as the colors chosen actually mix chemically not just visually. As Pollock chose the speed and weight of his line, viscous pools began to receive fluid streams. In the detail above at left, for example, the black ground actually absorbs thinned yellows, blues, reds, and whites. The fusion of paint with surface or field began to occur physically not just lyrically.

Pollock constantly evolved in his methodology and experimentation, and Convergence marks a junction of various techniques in one wet-on-wet canvas. In that regard, a dissection of Convergence could result in a stratification of the material qualities found in Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), One: Number 31 , and Number 32.

Pollock began his triad of masterpieces (see Hans Namuth photographs) with the black monochrome skeleton of Number 32, in a sense flushing out the working method for his new scale to come. Pollock also provides us with evidence of his step by step form of progression and ritualistic way of documenting experience by leaving the canvas finished at strata one. Pollock’s next experiment, One: Number 31, adds the first inkling of a time-based chemical reaction to his painting repertoire. He pushed his limits, and thus the world’s, by tossing turpentine onto multiple layers of paint in varying stages of oxidation. The paint crumples and even bleeds, grasping out toward the ground (see detail below left). By 1950, Pollock had started to thin out his paint into a more milky substance, intermittently present since Number 1A 1948 but more pronounced in his mural scale masterpieces. After applying his anchor layer of black paint, in Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) Pollock intersplices thin waves of color with additional forms of black, each layer still maintaining its material separateness nonetheless.

After a hiatus year of all-black canvases painted in 1951, Pollock returned to laying a first stratum of black for another mural scale work similar to his final canvases of 1950. This time, though, while painting Convergence, either in fury or in conscious experimentation, he threw globs of color into still wet black puddles, and again into streams of already flowing mixtures. For the first time line fully envelopes itself into ground, surface, and/or field, and natural reactions exponentially fracture Pollock’s gesture toward infinity. In painting after painting, Pollock experimented diligently, with many trials and errors, failures and successes, and I believe that the natural process building through his earlier works fully coalesces in Convergence.

Pollock said he was “nature” once, and Convergence seems an apt illustration of that statement. Since at least the days of cave paintings, through the evolution of frescoes and the beginnings of oil painting, the wet-on-wet fusion of image with surface –conscious vision with material reality—has been in the mind’s eye of humanity. In the great modern quest for this sublime, Pollock’s compañero and rival De Kooning provides a parallel trajectory in the search for onement with nature, albeit with a bit more direct human touch and more traditional means, by always keeping his paints wet:alive.

On his hunt to embody nature, Pollock chose to use the newest inventions of Western chemistry, enamel and aluminum synthetic paints, in his own unique, primitive way: a “natural growth out of a need,” he said. In the beginning, when Pollock first set canvases horizontally, he still had to “get acquainted” with new methods and materials, which meant baby-step experiments and advances. A simple glance at the scale and separated layers of earlier works (see Number 8, 1949) and then back to larger, fused, later ones (see One: Number 31 or Convergence) highlights this gradual progression.

Little by little, then, Pollock began to throw off the rigidity of Western consciousness and to explore more intuitive, fluid realms.

Fusing with subtle currents of life did have its consequences, especially in the context of Pollock’s time and place. With the weight of centuries on his shoulders it was groundbreaking that Pollock was even dancing, let alone with paint flying off “sticks” in his hand. Imagine, then, the quiet sounds of his Springs home in the vein of John Cage, the crisp brushing of his feet across the canvas, a bird or two chirping. As Pollock circled his vortexes of paint without inhibition he must have become aware of the intricacy and grandeur of his environs, his feet lifting off the ground ever so slightly.

This loosening up was accompanied by the death of Pollock’s analyst Dr. Edwin Heller, Pollock’s tether to earth and the man who had helped him stop drinking. Nevertheless, Pollock staid on his quest and as mentioned even reached the extreme of throwing turpentine—a material normally used to erase—to create his vision. In retrospect, over the summer of 1950, Pollock beautifully harnessed the chaos of nature into his painting process, but in doing so he also passed beyond the limits of his own capabilities: with pressure building and others filming, Pollock withdrew violently and had his first drink in years. He was after all human.

However, after you pass through one door of life, you already stand in the next room. You can never go back.

Before continuing on Pollock first needed new guides, ritualistic beings of imagery to accompany him in his journey. Through the following year he searched for such “concrete” bearings in his all black series. At the same time, Pollock could never forget his first days in New York with Thomas Hart Benton and José Clemente Orozco, nor the mural scale and wet-on-wet influences that they each represented respectively.

Although slowly loosing control, soon himself to merge with ground, Pollock’s comet hadn’t burnt out. I believe Pollock was rather building up the “force” necessary to attempt what would be his most intense, possibly awkward, but consequently honest painting session. In no way repeating himself, Pollock, now as Mr. Hyde, instead was posed to condense Numbers 30, 31, and 32 into one canvass. In the end, painting Convergence, whether in angst or genius inspiration, nature passed through him in one last wet, monumental session, until his synthetic paints began to turn back time and merge with nature again.