I had the pleasure recently of visiting the Guggenheim Museum in New York. It’s an amazing gallery building and my daughter Kate and I enjoyed going through it to see the exhibitions and displays. We both really enjoyed the Jackson Pollock exhibition, No Limits Just Edges.
The art of Jackson Pollock, (who just happens to share the same birthday as me) caused quite a stir in Australia in 1973 when the government at the time purchased the infamous Blue Poles for $1.3 million. It was quite a controversy at the time, with the media making all sorts of claims – from “he was drunk at the time’ to ‘it was painted by monkeys’. In hindsight, the painting was recently valued at $40 million so it seems Gough’s government made a good decision after all.
Anyway, if you’re an art teacher, or just want your students to have a bit of fun, you might like to check out www.jacksonpollock.org for a bit of interactive online action painting. Hopefully they will realise that creating art by dripping paint on a canvas is a little bit trickier than just, well, dripping paint on a canvas. After getting the kids to mess about with this tool, there are a lot of useful discussions worth having about line, colour and composition and how these elements work together.
Thanks to Kate for the masterpiece above!
Action Painting Online by Chris Betcher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.