After watching Robert Hughes's Empire of Signs, Jackson Pollack's death seems that much more tragic and wasteful for the art world.
Pollack saw epic landscapes all of his life and tried to capture the essence of them in his web of drips and lines and colour.
Pollack made no effort to clearly mark out humans, landmarks or particular trees or flowers he saw in these landscapes simply as it was not his style. It was the style of his forefathers which was lost and forgotten in time. Willem de Kooning stated that Pollack "broke the ice, he created a new scale for American painting, a fresh idea of surface and touch, a new kind of space."
Pollack presented us with the idea that not all is as it seems, he put paint down on a canvas he felt had a life of it own, he wanted it to live, to be free as those epic landscapes.
Pollack let the thoughts and visions spill out for all Abstract Impressionists after him to see.
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