Active Vs. Passive Painting

His body felt like it had become stiff standing in one place for so long. Screw it, he thought. I’ll put the canvas on the floor.

So Jackson Pollock decided that’s what he would do. A jar of homebrew sitting half finished on the stool by his side. Now came the absolute necessity to move his body at once. The paint dripped off of a rock hard brush and fell onto the large canvas below. House paint that ran and ran and ran and ran. Pretty little patterns. Juicy little drops.

“Hey, that’s somethin’.”

He was a man of few words.

It might not have been much more than that but it sparked a revolution in the way that artists began to approach the act of painting. I imagine it gave many the permission to paint the way they felt as opposed to the way they thought they should paint.