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SCMP Reporter

Who? Jackson Pollock

When? 1950

Where? New York

Number 1, 1950 is better known as Lavender Mist, a name art critic Clement Greenberg suggested for the painting.

It is a three-metre-long, 2.2-metre-high canvas covered with drips, splashes and swirls of oil, enamel and aluminium paint. The painting is composed mainly of white, blue, yellow, grey, brown, rosy pink and black colours.

Lavender Mist was one of  Pollock's first and most famous paintings in which he used the technique of 'action painting'.

This involved laying a canvas on the floor or walls of his barn studio, or outdoors at his rural Long Island home, and walking, sometimes almost dancing, around the canvas, applying paint in sweeping curves, flicks and trickles. Pollock said it was important to 'walk around it [the canvas], work from all four sides, and be in the painting'.

He sometimes used a stick instead of a brush, and occasionally added sand or broken glass to the paint to create an  impasto (thick layers of paint on a canvas).

He often poured enamel paint straight from the can onto the canvas. He liked using commercial enamel paints because they are more fluid than traditional oil paints, so he could weave more intricate webs and curves.

Lavender Mist is one of those paintings which you see for the first time and think, 'I can do that'. But if you tried it, you would be surprised.

As Time magazine critic Robert Hughes claimed in 1982, 'there are no successful Pollock forgeries [or imitations] ... they always end up looking like spaghetti.'

In Lavender Mist, Pollock is able to balance an almost automatic outpouring of emotions with controlled movements. There is a rhythm and beauty to the swirls of paint, within the seemingly random splashes and flicks.

His art isn't completely spontaneous - he sometimes touched up the drips of paint with a brush.

Lavender Mist has no formal arrangement like traditional paintings - there is no centre, no relationship between 'objects', and no sense of the work being restrained by its edges. Pollock sometimes painted what he liked and then cut the canvas to fit.

Although the painting is abstract, Pollock didn't see his art as unreal. He aimed to bring the physical into the paintings through his action-painting technique, and by pressing his hands into the paint.

It is difficult to see in the picture above as the painting itself is so large, but Pollock left hand prints in black paint at the top right of his work. Pollock is involving himself directly in the painting by doing this, as well as stamping his ownership and creativity on the work.

It may also have been an instinctive gesture of reference to primitive art, which he greatly admired.

Lavender Mist may look like the artist just went crazy and flicked some paint on a canvas, but actually it is a controlled and careful work by one of the greatest artists in American history.



Pollock's Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist)