Nevermind the Pollocks

September 23, 2005 8:51 AM

Nevermind the Pollocks. Splattery Friday flash fun.
posted by Gamblor (18 comments total)

Fun! This reminds me of a story I love about Pollock: Once when walking through MOMA with a couple of artist friends, we passed one of the splatter paintings, and one said, "That's the famous de Kooning," and I said, "What?" because it was clearly a Pollock and labeled as such. They said that once when Pollock was more depressed than usual, and very far into his alcoholic slide, he hadn't been producing work for a while, and had no desire to paint. One day de Kooning and someone else went over to see him, and asked if he'd been working, and he said no, and he didn't know if he could paint anymore. de Kooning and the other guy dragged him out to the studio, lay a canvas on the floor, and started splattering on it, saying "Of course you know how to paint. You know how to do this. You remember this don't you?" Before long they'd painted the whole canvas, they got Pollock to sign it, and now it's Pollock.

Full disclosure: My last name is Pollock but I am no relation.
posted by OmieWise at 9:01 AM on September 23, 2005

Extra fun: hit the space bar and use the arrows to adust inertia and twirl. Cool link!
posted by erebora at 10:28 AM on September 23, 2005

any way to change colors?
posted by tomplus2 at 10:29 AM on September 23, 2005

ooooh, wonderful fun
posted by threadbare at 10:29 AM on September 23, 2005

Thanks for the tip, erebora. I thought the blobs developed a little fast...
posted by Specklet at 10:47 AM on September 23, 2005

Interesting story, OmieWise- especially in light of the fact that Miltos Manetas has "signed" his name to a Stamen Design creation.
posted by oneirodynia at 10:54 AM on September 23, 2005

Howcome the paint is pee colored?
posted by R. Mutt at 11:14 AM on September 23, 2005

Yeah, this is kind of hilarious:

"Please, try to understand the way we work at Neen: we consider all visual/audio material as everybody's property. It's more cool like that."
posted by OmieWise at 11:24 AM on September 23, 2005

Extra fun: hit the space bar and use the arrows to adust inertia and twirl.

I see no effect when I do this. Are you actually seeing any controls when you press those keys?

Howcome the paint is pee colored?

Your pee is orange?
posted by dobbs at 11:34 AM on September 23, 2005

You can see the values on the controls by painting the bottom left and right corners with big blobs of paint (the numbers for inertia and twirl show up on the orange/pee-colored-if-your-monitor-is-busted-or-you-have-blood-in-your-urine background in white)
posted by Bugbread at 11:59 AM on September 23, 2005

am i the only one who never understood pollock? or for that matter most post modern art. I understand that the camera supposedly freed artists from the need to recreate life, but i always sort of felt some art critic saw it, made a lot of buzz. It generally fit in well with the american agenda at the time.... or rather that because he could do something so free from form it demonstrated that american artists were not bound to the same restrictions as artists in communist countries. In fact the cia even financed him under this assumption.... but it still just seems like an acid trip that an overly eager public lapped up like so much intoxicating shnozberry juice.
posted by sourbrew at 12:00 PM on September 23, 2005

I see no effect when I do this. Are you actually seeing any controls when you press those keys?

There's a "Twirl" indicator in the lower-right corner. In white, natch, but if you orange it you can see it. Hit "Space" then use the left and right arrows to move it up and down.

No luck with color yet. That's sorta key, I would think. Gotta be there somewhere.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:00 PM on September 23, 2005

Also, Spacebar plus up and down arrows = "inertia" adjustment.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:02 PM on September 23, 2005

am i the only one who never understood pollock?

Yes, you are. ;P

Actually, his drip paintings, though the most hyped, are a small fraction of his overall work. There's some amazing stuff in there.

Somebody once told me that in his drip paintings Pollock was actually painting images in the air, which is total BS, but it sounded cool at the time.
posted by mrgrimm at 12:05 PM on September 23, 2005

When I was a kid, my grandma (an artist) and I make a couple imitation Pollocks one afternoon - it's incredibly difficult to do what he does, namely draw the eye away from the edges of the painting and to the interesting parts. A lot of modern art is about separating form from meaning, and I think what Pollock does is separate the aesthetic of art from its religious, social, and cultural connotations.
posted by muddgirl at 1:15 PM on September 23, 2005

It's been theorized that the reason Pollock's work is so visually compelling is that he (subconciously) was painting fractals.
posted by Gamblor at 1:38 PM on September 23, 2005

I couldn't find a color control either, and I couldn't expose the corner values to boot. It's way too blobby to really be Pollock, and I hate that when I pause to consider strategy I get this modernist leaf shape with two rounded and two square corners, like the Beatrice logo or something.
posted by dhartung at 3:42 PM on September 23, 2005

Dhartung: I probably gave slightly bum advice. The numbers don't appear in the corners, but at about 1/4 of the way from the left on the bottom and 1/4 of the way from the right on the bottom. That is:

------------------------
|                      |
|                      |
|     23        12     |
------------------------

Also, they don't appear unless you hit the space bar.
posted by Bugbread at 4:41 PM on September 23, 2005