QuoteProject
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.
Jackson Pollock
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Abstract art challenges viewers by lacking traditional structures and inviting personal interpretation.

In this quote, Jackson Pollock reflects on the nature of abstract painting, arguing that its very essence lies in its abstraction which provokes thought and emotional response. He emphasizes that the absence of conventional beginnings and endings in his work can be seen as a virtue, allowing viewers the freedom to find their own meanings and interpretations within the art, even if that was not the reviewer’s original intent.

Themes

AbstractArtInterpretationEmotionPollock

In practice

Example use cases

In an art class discussion about abstract works, this quote can be used to illustrate how interpretations vary.

More from Jackson Pollock

I don't paint nature. I am nature.
Jackson PollockRead
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.
Jackson PollockRead
He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.
Jackson PollockRead
My painting does not come from the easel.
Jackson PollockRead
I've been thinking of death a lot, and I am amazed by its inevitability, frightened, as we all are, of the totally unknown, and yet feel a long sleep is somehow earned by those of us who live on the edge.
Jackson PollockRead
I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.
Jackson PollockRead

Similar quotes

Designers may be the true intellectuals of the future.
Paola AntonelliRead
Often as a poet I find that I am somewhat outside an experience I want to hold onto, consciously taking mental notes or writing them down in my journal - for fear that I will forget. It's not unlike being on a trip and taking pictures, your face behind a camera the whole time - the entire experience mediated by a lens.
Natasha TretheweyRead
I never considered myself a movie star, and I didn't want to become a movie star, because as soon as you do, you throw away that possibility of playing character. You really do. All of a sudden you're just an entity, you know?
Sam ShepardRead
You see, what is my purpose of performance artist is to stage certain difficulties and stage the fear the primordial fear of pain, of dying, all of which we have in our lives, and then stage them in front of audience and go through them and tell the audience, 'I'm your mirror; if I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.'
Marina AbramovicRead
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
V. S. NaipaulRead
I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.
Stephen FryRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.