ACTION PAINTING

Action Painting
Age 22-24, Durham County, North Carolina, 1966-1968
The painting for this poem is Jackson Pollock's painting, Blue Poles
-- This is one poem, in an autobiographical series of poems, I posted here at WriteSpike. Go to my stories section for others. They are in chronological order. --

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear
to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act.
~ Harold Rosenberg ~

In painting, the primary agency of physical motion...is the line...as stroke or figure (in the sense of 'figure skating'). In its passage on the canvas each such line can establish the actual movement of the artist's body as an esthetic statement.
~ Hans Hofmann ~

After my mobiles
and before my photography
was Jackson Pollock

the traditional artist
painting a figure
in front of him
or a picture in his mind
was gone

instead was the moment
the act of creation itself

and years later
somewhat crude
a bit rough
that moment
would still be there
in its stark freshness

it was more than just an idea
or a look
it was the doorway
to expression

I took this personally
as I wanted to work in a visual style
that let me move freely
but I knew my drawing skills were nil

yet I did understand composition
arrangement, shapes and figure-ground
so later I would create work
from the point of abstraction
with paint flowing as the moment demanded

in 1967 in New York
the Museum of Modern Art
held a Pollock retrospective -
I drove from Durham over a weekend
then a month later I did it again

like a worshiper in a temple
I roamed the rooms
surrounded by his large paintings
that swallowed viewers
in their forest and tangle
of lines

and everywhere was the sense of movement
of the moment that paint hit the canvas
everywhere that sense of now