Drip, Daddy, Drip: Jackson Pollack and the Paint Machine
There was a movie I fell in love with when I was young. It was called "What a Way To Go." I would stay up for crazy hours in the morning to watch it in rerun on the TV, back in the day when that was the only way to see it.
The film “What a Way To Go” starred Shirley MacLaine and a roll call of great comic actors of that time. Shirley's character wanted a simple life with a man she loved and a family they would raise. But every man she marries, and there are a few, becomes enormously wealthy through some freak chance, and poor Shirley is left at home alone. Until the husband dies. The husbands die. It’s a comedy.
One husband, played by Paul Newman (and interestingly named Larry Flint), is an avant-garde painter. His newest invention is a machine that converts music from the stereo into art by splattering a canvas with paint, in time to the music, until the entire canvas is covered in paint.
Jackson Pollack's unique style of drip painting brought him great fame and widespread notoriety (some called him "Jack the Dripper"). He also produced a body of work that many think is one of the greatest of any American painter. His work No. 5, on an enormous 8x4 canvas, brought him his first rush of attention in 1948.
His work is often called "unconventionally pretty." No. 5 is a painting I just fell into, like a parallel universe coded in colors. It was one of the first that grabbed me and caused me to look at art differently.
Pollack had a lifelong struggle with alcohol. His unconventional paintings hit big, and he struck it rich as an artist. But just a few years later, alcohol consumed him, and he died at 44. Struck it rich by quirk (and talent), then died young, just like Shirley's movie husbands. However, there was no comedy in Jackson Pollack's death.