Art History - Jackson Pollock

Our Specials schedule this year is

Mon - Nature Study & Form Drawing

Tue - Farm Day

Wed - Handwork & Philosophy, Science Club

Thu - Art History & Structured Word Inquiry

Fri - Forest School

In my Art History 2022-2023 blog post, I decided December would be Jackson Pollock. Here are some resources and my planning notes:

Jackson Pollock
1912 - 1956

also

“Many of the passages in his 'heroic' paintings of 1947-51 remind one of Monet, or even of Whistler. Fog, vagueness, translucency, the scrutiny of tiny incidents pullulating in a large field -- Lavender Mist, 1950, the title Pollock gave his most ravishingly atmospheric painting about sums it up. In it one sees the delicacy -- at a scale that reproduction cannot suggest -- with which Pollock used the patterns caused by the separation and marbling of one enamel wet in another, the tiny black striations in the dusty pink, to produce an infinity of tones. It is what his imitators could never do, and why there are no successful Pollock forgeries; they always end up spaghetti, looking like whereas vomit, or Pollock -- in onyx, or his best work, at any rate -- had an almost preternatural control over the total effect of those skeins and receding depths of paint. In them, the light is always right. Nor are they absolutely spontaneous: he would often retouch the drip with a brush.”

from Art: An American Legend in Paris by Robert Hughes
Time Magazine - Feb 1, 1982
(which also mentions Claes Oldenburg, our artist for April)

Mural, 1943

to go with Mural, I also have a SchoolArts magazine ClipCard activity called "Decoding Jackson Pollock"

Discovering Great Artists: Hands-On Art for Children in the Styles of the Great Masters
by MaryAnn Kohl and Kim Solga
p.93 - "Action Spatter" activity
available online as a FREE PDF from Bright Ring Publishing

Using Art to Create Art: Creative Activities Using Masterpieces
by Wendy Libby
p.169 - art movement (Expressionism)
p.170 - "Action Painting" activity
p.171 - sample piece of art, Free Form (1946)
p.172 - mini biography

Olivia
by Ian Falconer

I decided to join Lotus Stewart's full Art History Kids website (The Studio) and get access to her past lesson plans. I think it will really help me this year to have so much already done for me. Jackson Pollock is in the Archives.

SEPTEMBER 2021: ACTION PAINTING WITH JACKSON POLLOCK

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week of Dec 5:

Week One PDF

p.3: picture of Jackson Pollock

p.5: Mural, 1943

p.8: Number 1, 1949

p.4: Autumn Rhythm (Number 30), 1950

p.6: Convergence, 1952

p.7: Blue Poles, 1952

recall also the Jackson Pollock piece we saw at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in October (Sleeping Effort, 1953)

talk about quote from Robert Hughes

watch video

Blue Poles, 1952

week of Dec 12:

Lavender Mist (Number 1), 1950

do "2023" calendar artwork inspired by "Mural"

We studied Jackson Pollock several years ago, as one of the artists in our 2018 Class Play, and so we didn't give him as much time this year. It was more of an "Is It Art?" conversation, and an introduction to Abstract Expressionism. I also wanted the children to consider the idea of making non-representational Jackson Pollock-style paintings as the backdrops to their puppet shows.

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