For the task of consuming a book I chose to look at ‘Jackson Pollock New Approaches – The Museum of Modern Art, New York’. The book consists of how highly his work was regarded by historians, artists and 20^th century art. Opinions of these individuals is included throughout the book beginning with ‘T. J. Clark’, who discusses how the scale and size of the work could be the artists way of representing his subject matter which is highly important for the way he works. A key quote I picked up in this section was how his abstraction ‘was a kind of literalness, a return to the world’ and this could explain how his larger paintings were often accompanied by smaller works.

‘Robert Storr’ discusses how Pollock discovered Mexican Muralism during his mid-teens and became enthralled by it. I found it interesting how ‘Pollock’s engagement with the Mexican Muralists lasted over a decade’ as this suggests how compelled he felt to research deeper and it also states how he was inspired by Orzco for the creation of his sketch book drawings.

It is suggested that Pollock continued from where Picasso and Braque had ceased with Cubism. This book made me consider how artists generally seem to borrow ideas from each other and make them their own, often by expanding on them further. For another example I discovered within this book, Rauschenburg who followed after Pollock integrated elements of Cubism with the drips Pollock was best known for.

A section of writing that caught my eye in the book was ‘Every so often a painter has to destroy painting’ I feel like this is talking about how unconventional his style of painting was in comparison to what may have been deemed traditional at this time. It’s the idea that sometimes doing something completely obscure with paint or art work  can create a new style of painting and influence artists to develop pre-existing ideas of what painting can be.

Bibliography – Jackson Pollock New Approaches – The Museum of Modern Art, New York

It was asked of us to create a ‘passport’ however the information given as to what that might entail was minimal. This allowed room for us to be as personal or impersonal as we wished and gave each of us a great amount of freedom.

For me the passport began with a booklet slightly smaller than an A5 sheet of paper, made up of four pages. This was overall unsuccessful, the colour scheme didn’t work as it wasn’t reflective of my personality and this fuelled the childlike appearance of the work. I would say it bares resemblance to a scrapbook a child might make at a craft club.

I then created a much smaller booklet in the same style as the first, in this I included tracings on acetate and masking tape from images on my phone. The reverse of this booklet hides song lyrics with a personal meaning behind them as well as an explanation intended to be concealed. I hoped to explore how the visibility of the material used for tracing could disguise the true characters of those depicted.

Currently I am working on a passport that includes drawings without the use of trace, information on the relevance of the sketches is also specified. I hope to include song lyrics and poetry in this booklet as I have with the previous two to help express my feelings.  I feel as though my next step could be leaning more towards something three-dimensional, influenced by some of the work we all looked at collectively, which was produced by colleagues of mine.