Paul Jackson Pollock was an artist who is most famed for his “Drip Paintings” which is the style of painting that he adopted between 1947 – 1950. Pollock was born in 1912 and died in 1956 after a fatal accident after he had already adopted the reputation of being one of the most influential abstract expressionist artists of his time. The painting that I have chosen to do my contextual analysis on is one of his earliest drip paintings called the “Full Fathom Five”

“Full Fathom Five” was created on an oil canvas, with the dimensions of 129.2 x 79 cm, which was laid out onto the floor in order for him to do his drip painting technique. The painting consisted of an under layer, which he created with use of a brush and a palate knife in order to create texture, a top layer, which makes use of his drip painting technique whereby he pours industrial or house paint out along a stick whilst moving his body and in this layer he also embedded different knick …show more content…
He aimed to create pieces of art that displayed his energy, art that was unplanned, art that moved away from the perfection of cubism, he wanted his art to be seen as a creative accident and because of this, he had many critics but all the more fans. Pollocks’ fans viewed him as a groundbreaking artist that not only painted a scene; they believe that his art was a representation of himself, the canvas was the artists stage and that is why his fans at the time felt such a connection to his work, because of the layering and the chaos and the “wild, romantic, outpouring of self-expression”, the viewer can see what was going on in the artist's mind at the time. The reason why Pollock was so popular during his reign is because the people also wanted to experience the freedom that he