Jackson Pollock was a man who was almost as famous for his drunken, violent rages as he was for his Art. However, despite his human frailties, even the most ardent critics cannot deny the tremendous effect that Pollock had on the 20th century art world, and the extent of which he revolutionized the way we view modern art.
Jackson Pollock adopted different styles of painting during his lifetime. In his earlier years, artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, whose painting style was entitled "American Realism", and also Mexican artists such as Diego Rivera inspired his painting and style. However, Pollock was troubled by his inability to find his own signature style, and turned to the bottle to overcome his problems.
Not long afterwards though, in the mid 1940's, Pollock began to develop what became known as "abstract expressionism". This revolutionary style was utterly different from anything that had come before it. Pollock garnered both support and ridicule for many of his "drip" paintings. It was often stated that any child, chimpanzee or dog could make a painting just as good as one of Pollock's drip paintings. However, it is easy to determine the difference between a "Pollock" drip painting and any other artist's. This is simply because of the way Pollock dripped the paint onto a canvas, which produces a result akin to a fractal image. Fractal Images display self-similarity, meaning that the image will look much the same at any level of magnification. Often Mother Nature attains this effect, but Pollock is one of the few human artists to successfully replicate such images by hand .
One of Pollock's main claims to fame was the way in which his art did not merely imitate but investigated the detailed inner being of nature. When the artist Hans Hoffman came to see Pollock's works he made the comment "You do not work from nature", to which Pollock rather gruffly responded "I am Nature!" This quote perfectly portrays the man (and his art!), who categorically denied the label "abstract" artist.
