Jackson Pollock - Painting the Unconscious - Essay Example

Jackson Pollock’s Art: Painting the Unconscious Word Count: 310 page) In his piece Lavender Mist, Jackson Pollock’s art largely deals with issues of the subconscious: imagery, symbolism, and the unconscious mind. Lavender Mist is an abstract piece of art that has sprinkles of lavender paint amongst a variety of lighter pastels including some black lines interspersed with the other colors. The imagery is abstract, so one has to see what is the story that the artist is trying to convey. Pollock’s style of painting was such that he put a canvas on the floor and then basically put layers and layers of paint on top of each other until the canvas was eventually full.

Even though there is no object of the artwork, per se, perhaps the imagery was supposed to be more symbolic and evocative of something else, which will be discussed next. Pollock’s Lavender Mist delves into the symbolic nature of the messiness of life—yet at the same time how it is perfect. Even though Pollock’s artwork may just look, at first glance, like a disaster—Pollock perfectly combines synchronicity and evenness and a balanced approach in the piece. Pollock’s painting mines the unconscious possibility with the ability to make the viewer think, ‘What if…?

’ “What do [Pollock’s] drawings tell us, then, about Pollock’s early active engagement with the idea of the unconscious? They indicate that in this stage of his career, Pollock’s representation of the unconscious was grounded in Jungian theory… There are documents related to the psychoanalytic drawings…”1 These psychoanalytic renderings from Pollock, such as that in Lavender Mist, are paintings that ask the difficult questions about what goes on in our minds’ eyes. Jackson Pollock, though at times an artist whose work is difficult to parse in terms of meaning because of his irregular methods—demonstrates through the painting Lavender Mist that three key elements are found here: imagery, symbolism, and the unconscious mind.

WORKS CITED Doezema, Marianne, et al. Reading American Art. US: Yale University Press, 1998.