Jackson Pollock had a huge impact on art and painting as we knew it, but his success didn’t shield him from his own demons. Pollock viewed art and being an artist as part of a modern ritual in which the artist should “die at the top” to gain ultimate fame, to be remembered with the likes of Van Gogh and Rimbaud. He began to see himself as a sort of sacrifice for the arts and their development into something new and greater than. Unfortunately, the tragedy was not that Pollock died, but that he did so when he was no longer on the top. He had become weak and unable or unwilling to create in his final years. Many felt as though his end came at the wrong time. Instead of other artists turning to this sort of “new art” Pollock was producing, many began returning to earlier forms of art and America began celebrating a sanity in art, which was lacking in Pollock’s painting style.
A couple years after his death, the act of painting, the artists personal mark, and the form and meaning of traditional art became clichés in college art departments. These innovations were now widely accepted and found their way into textbooks. During Pollock’s career he created magnificent art works that destroyed the image of painting as it was accepted by critics and society. The strokes, smears, and lines became less representative of objects and began to exist solely on their own. While some earlier paintings, like those out of the Dada era, were far more abstract, they still obeyed an esthetic, with one colored shape balancing another. The size and shape of the form along with the size and shape of the canvas were consciously considered. Pollock’s method of painting by dripping, slashing, squeezing, and daubing paint placed the highest value on the diaristic gesture of painting. While he was inspired by the attitude of surrealist artists, he didn’t use their art style as an example. His work was less arranged and “artful.” He would often place a large canvas flat onto the floor, allowing him to truly be in his work. By treating the canvas this way, he was unable to see the canvas as a whole or any extended section of its parts. His direct application and automatic approach to painting made it clear that he did not subscribe to the old craft of painting. The way he created bordered on ritual, where paint was used as a secondary medium to record more important gestures. Pollock’s method of painting became an act. He would often judge these “acts” for long periods of time, with a harsh and critical eye, before he could move on to the next “act.” His paintings became more about gesture than the medium or concept. He knew the difference between a good gesture and bad one. This conscious artistry is what made him a part of the traditional community of painters. 
To fully understand and appreciate a Jackson Pollock painting we must constantly move between the identification of the hands and body that flung the paint, intermingling with the canvas, and submit to the objective markings the entangle and assault us. This instability can make the piece feel incomplete, but if we don’t attempt to completely comprehend the painting, we are asking to little of the art, as well as ourselves. Pollock’s paintings threw out the traditional idea of form which allowed the spectator to enter the painting from multiple locations. Instead of focusing on form and our eyes following a prescribed path through a painting, the viewer enters and exists Pollocks paintings in many different areas at different times. Pollock also ignored the confines of the canvas, making his paintings seem as if they go on forever in all directions. The interruption of activity caused by the four edges of the canvas blurred the lines that existed in traditional painting, separating the artists world from that of the spectator and reality. The form Pollock followed allowed the viewer to partake in the delirium of gesture he created. The scale of his mural sized paintings added to the sense of an environment that surrounded the viewer. He knew that the size of the art work in relation to the size of the spectator had a large influence on how much the spectator was willing to surrender to the experience. These large-scale pieces took the viewer out of their everyday world of familiar habits and into a world created by the artist that extended off of the canvas and into the entire room. The viewer became intertwined with the art and changed from being an observer to an active participant. Pollock’s discovery of things like mark, gesture, color, hardness, and softness had a simplicity and directness to it that translated over into his paintings.
