"The very fact that his paintings had been made not with gentlemanly oils but with the sort of industrial paints used by builders and laborers was further proof of his tough-guy status. This was no effete character in a smock and a beret; this was a portrait of the artist as America - and the rest of the world - had never seen him before."
(Jackson Pollock - Evelyn Toynton - Yale University Press)
"The work of the Surrealists, which explicitly drew on unconscious sources, had been familiar to New York artists since at least 1936, when it was featured in a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art... John Graham, who befriended Pollock in the 1930s and is generally regarded as the man who first "discovered" him, saw the Surrealists' playfulness and their use of unconscious material as a liberating alternative to the pure rationalism of Cubism - the other artistic movement that influenced Pollock during this period, and would continue to do so for a long time. Pollock himself particularly admired the paintings of Joan Miro, whose use of calligraphic lines and blobs of paint were to have a great influence on his own work."
The Surrealists were heavily influenced by Freud's ideas about the unconscious, free association, and the primary importance of dreams, they rejected his systematic approach to such things, along with the idea of taming the unconscious by seeking to understand it too closely. Instead, they believed in giving it free rein.
I have chosen to look at Jackson Pollock as I wanted to start creating automatic drawing with paint, instead of using string as a medium. I used floor paint so that I would have less control, and also it meant that the lines of the paint were longer and it fell on the paper in much more interesting ways than by just using acrylic.
