Jackson Pollock, Number 2, 1949

By Amanda Ghiloni ’22

Jackson Pollock’s Number 2, 1949 is a 3 foot tall, over 15 feet long splatter style painting, with paints of a variety of types and colors paint that form lines and splashes without any purposeful form. There is a great amount of variance in texture and shine across the piece, due to the different types of paint and application styles. Pollock utilizes his “all-over” style of composition in the work, creating lines in such a way that there is no one place in the piece that is any more or any less a part of the whole of the piece.

The piece embodies a sense of freedom Pollock caught to capture in his art. It frees painting from all artistic conventions, frees line from being used to convey forms, and frees the paint itself from its natural stillness. Through Pollock’s painting process and the forms, he gives the paint on the canvases life, as they tumble about, capturing his movement. The motion of the painting is not motion of a subject, but motion of paint and line. The composition of the work is completely free of a structure, as each line tracks the motion of itself, with little concern from the lines surrounding, or the space it fills. That is not to say that there is no relationship between the lines, but they coexist more than cooperate. The colors of the piece seem to be chosen arbitrarily, not prescribing to existing palettes or sticking to any real adjective that spans them all. The yellow melts into the painting, the red is muted, the white is bright, and the black and gray fade into shadows. The brown background muddies them all, creating something of a mess in the color sphere, but that mess contributes to the theme of liberation as the colors are not shackled to playing particular roles or forming a cohesive scheme, they merely exist. Altogether, the piece is truly free form any sort of meaning or form or accurate interpretations how can one define something designed to defy what is placed upon it.