And today we're talking about Jackson Pollock in the studio and this is going to be real short. Because a lot of this, you're going to learn on the fly as Pollock did himself. You'll find that it's not easy to control paint flowing. But you can imagine if you did this for five years, for eight years. You'd get quite good at it and you'd gain a high level of control over something which is inherently difficult to do just that, difficult to control. So, the first tip I'd like to give you is that when you go to the paint store, a lot of cans of paint look the same. These are totally, totally different kinds of paint, the only thing that they have in common is that they're both called enamel paint. You'll recall that the word enamel doesn't tell you a damn thing about what kind of paint it is. Rather it tells you about the properties of the paint and those properties namely are that it has a lot of covering power. It has a low viscosity, it's very brushable, and it dries to a hard, often glossy, film. So what kind of paints do that? A lot of paints do that. So, if you're going to be mixing and matching, if you're going to be worrying about how to clean up your paint, it's good to know what kind of paint actually you're working with. And the best way to do that is actually to look on the back, sometimes it'll tell you in the front. This one, by the way, is a Benjamin Moore. It doesn't tell me, is this acrylic, is it latex, is it alkyd, is it linseed oil? I have no idea until I go to the back and then I see directions for how to clean up. And it says clean up, use soap and water. Bingo, now we know what it is. This is an acrylic emulsion paint because it's telling you to use soap and water. So it really limits the type of enamel paints that are out there that you can clean up with soap and water. So we know now that anything that I want to clean up this red off of, soap and water is the way to do it. Sometimes they're nice to you though and they tell you on the front, if you can read through the paint drips here. It says Interior-Exterior Alkyd Urethane Gloss Enamel. It's a whole lot of paint jargon there. And this is really consumer stuff, it's not made for artists, by the way. That's exactly why Picasso initially was interested in these alkyd enamel paints. So enamel, that word we just talked about. Gloss, well guess what? Enamels are glossy, so that does not tell us much of anything. Alkyd, and recall this word, this is that modified linseed oil that dries fast. So it is oil paint. It's compatible with solvent, with mineral spirits, or with turpentine. And that's how to clean it up, by the way. And finally it says "urethane", and this is specifically what kind of alkyd it is. You've probably heard of polyurethanes or epoxies, which can be formulated into paints. Really it's an adhesive. You can cast this stuff in sculpture, you can seal your back deck with it. Tells you it's something very, very durable, hard. Good for if you're going to paint your radiator or your car or your shed or something like that. And, our old friend artist oil paint. In many, many periods of Pollock's work, he did use artist oil paint, often directly out of the tube. So in a quick little demo here, I think you probably could have figured out how to do that yourself. Now a lot of people suggest that Pollock never painted with a brush in his so called high Pollock paintings. Its not true, he painted with a lot of brushes. A lot of crappy brushes, sometimes like this one rock hard, because one of my previous students didn't clean it out, and by the way, when you don't clean an oil brush, it's good for the trash can or for making Pollocks. So it's true that he would very very rarely ever use a brush in contact with a canvas, but quite frequently, he would use it to drip off of. Now when working with alkyd paints, or really with any kind of enamel paints, household paints, it's a good idea to stir them thoroughly if you want it to act in a uniform way. Now occasionally in a Pollock you'll recognize alligator skinning. That's because the paint was not thoroughly mixed and certain areas of the paint had too much binder, other parts had too little binder. But those over-rich areas of the paint film then get that alligator skinning kind of surface. If that's something you're going for then go ahead don't stir it. The medium is usually rich on top. So if I were to paint just this, drop it. There's a good chance that we would get some alligator skinning. But I'll follow good practice and stir thoroughly here and the kind of brush stroke, if you would, that Pollock would use is something like this. So, as you can see, I've done something to my eye already rather elegant. It's not because I'm a master of this technique. It's because there are certain inherit properties in the meeting of enamel paints that allow this extraordinary changing of directions, blobbing, and then running. Really an amazing interaction between paint in canvas, and guess what, paint in paint. And we already see these two wet colors bleeding into one another. And sometimes this rather chaotic kind of event happens. And this is not something that Pollock can control physically. Rather, it's one that he understands will happen, and he can decide when that should happen, when it shouldn't. If I didn't want that effect to happen, no problem I just wait a week before adding the red, that skins over, and no longer do we have this kind of bleeding wet into wet paint effects. By the way those wet into wet paint effects will be different depending on what medium you're painting with. Oil will blend into alkyd in a very different way than it will blend into an acrylic, a water based paint as you know from making salad dressing, they don't mix. Now switching to that urethane alkyd paint, giving it a good stir. I'm now going to paint with nothing more than a paint stirrer that you can find at the Benjamin Moore store or many many other places. Here we can see it's flowing, it's wrinkling, because my hand is not moving very quickly, I'm giving this line a very very different quality then that red, which I allowed to run much more quickly. So we'll end this one here. Very, very short class. But go ahead and experiment with a lot of different ways to allow this paint to run off of your brush, to explode out of your turkey baster, or what have you. Try anything and everything to drip paint off and then try different distances. Try, if you have an unstretched canvas that you choose to paint on, try a huge one. Try walking into the canvas and then, if you paint on unstretched canvas, which I have in here obviously, you can choose a certain area of the painting to crop. And play that photography game in saying, you know what rather than this, let's zoom in and just make a small painting out of that, since that's really what I'm interested in. That last step to a Pollock that many other painters don't have recourse to if they've started on a stretched canvas.
