Jacksonpollock.org (2003)
Its disappointing to me how this community responds to Jackson Pollack. Most of the Pollack supporter&#x27;s comments seem to assume that if a person doesn&#x27;t think he&#x27;s a genius of incredible technical ability, then that means that person is automatically an ignorant person that&#x27;s making wild, uninformed, random guesses about how art is created.<p>I think Pollack&#x27;s paintings are aesthetically pleasing. I&#x27;m not a professional artist, however I am an art and art history hobbyist. I have been for decades. I like his paintings. I don&#x27;t, however, think they are special or that he was an artistic genius whose paintings should have broken the record at one point for the most expensive work of art ever sold. That&#x27;s OK though, we all have different tastes and a guy with $100 million just happened to have different tastes from this guy with no millions.<p>However, my opinion isn&#x27;t random or uninformed. I know how a painting is created. How the surfaces are prepared. How preparatory drawings and smaller studies are done. How the final drawing is made. How the underpainting is done. My art is pretty bad compared to professionals. However, studying it for decades means I&#x27;ve watched actual masters do their thing for a countless number of hours. I know how the Italian masters created their works of art in great detail. I know how Pollack created his. The level of technical skill required to become a master of classical realism is absurd. Pollack&#x27;s strength was executing and publishing an idea no one had done before. In the grand scheme of all of art, I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a particularly strong strength when compared to masters of classical realism.<p>My opinion is based on an intimate knowledge of what it takes to be that good. If you disagree with my conclusion that&#x27;s fine and reasonable but to pretend that everyone doesn&#x27;t consider him a highly skilled genius is ignorant is in itself pretty ignorant.<p>If I wanted to create a work like Pollack&#x27;s, there would likely be a learning curve, but we aren&#x27;t talking the same amount of practice and preparation that classically trained artists require to even be semi-competent. Like I said before, the biggest strength of the work he is known for was originality, not technical competence. He might have also been technically competent as an artist, but when I look at the works that made him famous I don&#x27;t see it.<p>I&#x27;d be willing to hang all kinds of abstract &#x2F; modern &#x2F; postmodern art on my wall because it adds color, sometimes has great composition, and is aesthetically pleasing. However, most of it just isn&#x27;t meaningful to me in the same way that other genres of art are like classical realism and impressionism. I don&#x27;t think anyone should feel like that&#x27;s a personal attack on their preferences. I&#x27;m not missing something, it just has a different effect on me. If you don&#x27;t like classical realism you aren&#x27;t missing something either, you just like different things.