When modern art is brought to the table, the question for the untrained is quite often: Is this art? What makes art? Can I do this? For such questions, answers always vary. It is art if you think it is art even if it may not be good art. The final consensus is that it is art if it challenges and sustains. Such art is universally held to be art.
Early on, modern art broke tradition, broke stereotypes, and set the art world on its heels. Until this time artists tried to capture a realistic experience--people, objects, landscapes--and put them on canvas. The moderns were the first to ignore the boundaries of the canvas. In fact, iconoclasts that they were, they acknowledged the confines of the canvas and its two-dimensional world and started experimenting with new techniques. The Impressionistic painters were the first, then the Post-Impressionistic painters went jumps ahead. Instead of painting broad realistic pictures, they began defying shapes, colors, time.
Jackson Pollock represents one segment of this new modern art, that which is called "action painting," or "spatter painting." This book, "Action Jackson," details Jackson's technique of creating art and making the viewer feel and appreciate his vision and told simply enough for a child to understand.
How did Jackson work? He lay out a huge canvas on the floor of his studio, studied it, then spattered house paint across it--directly from the can, from a stick, a brush. He worked over a series of days to get everything just right.
His vision was to lay out colors and patterns and the intermixing of colors and patterns to create a canvas that spoke of something more cosmic than a bowl of apples. For Jackson the process of painting said as much as the final product. This book beautifully conveys the idea of his vision and his process and his final product. I never dreamed a writer and an illustrator could capture the essence of Pollock's work in one thin children's book, but this most definitely does.
Perhaps the success of this book in capturing Jackson's style and work earned it an Honor Award in the Robert F. Siebert contest, and a New York Times Best Book of the Year, and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. "Action Jackson" was published in 2002. Jackson Pollock died in a car crash in 1956.