Jackson Pollock Artist Quotations

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things - creating molding the earth - whether it be the plains of the west - or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction - some with a brush - some with a shovel - some choose a pen.

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

My paintings do not have a center, but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.

When I say artist I mean the man who is building things -- creating molding the earth -- whether it be the plains of the west -- or the iron ore of Penn. It's all a big game of construction -- some with a brush -- some with a shovel -- some choose a pen.

I don't paint nature. I am nature.

Well, method is, it seems to me, a natural growth out of a need, and from a need the modern artist has found new ways of expressing the world about him. I happen to find ways that are different from the usual techniques, which seems a little strange at the moment, but I don't think there's anything very different about it. I paint on the floor and this isn't unusual - the Orientals did that.

Something in me knows where I’m going, and - well, painting is a state of being. ... Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing objects in nature such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy , the motion and the other inner forces ... the modern artist is working with space and time , and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

The modern artist... is working and expressing an inner world - in other words - expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces.

Every good painter paints what he is.