On this date, January 28, in 1912, Jackson Pollock is born. My son recently texted me a couple of pictures (see below) and asked “Which one of these is our friends’ 15 month old daughter and which one is Pollock?” You can click the images to enlarge them if you think it will help you figure out the question. “That’s a tough one,” I texted back. “They’re both pretty bad.” It probably won’t surprise you to learn, after looking at his work, that Pollock suffered from severe mental health issues. He died in August 1956 at age 44 in an alcohol-related single-car collision. I wonder what the inside of the car looked like. Maybe it should have been preserved as his final contribution to abstract art. He also killed a passenger. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Jackson Pollock
A Day at LACMA
We drove out to LACMA last weekend to see The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950, and Re-SITE-ing the West: Contemporary Photographs from the Permanent Collection. I love exhibits like this . . . I’ve lived in California my whole life and I feel like these Western landscapes are part of my DNA. While we were there, we also took in the Dan Flavin retrospective. Flavin’s work consists of standard fluorescent tubes arranged in patterns not beyond the imagination of the average six-year-old. I tried viewing them up close, far away, from the side . . . I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it. LACMA helpfully provided a detailed theory of Flavin’s work in the form of a fold-out brochure with a lot of small print, but I didn’t read it. Isn’t art supposed to provide some sort of pleasure and/or illumination — pardon the pun — on… Read more →