Understanding JACKSON POLLOCK's Life, Process & Creative Expression w/ HELEN HARRISON - Highlights

"Well, that's it. He said it himself. “It's energy and motion made visible.” So these are things that come spontaneously from his own feelings, but they're based on, first of all, observation, the natural world around him, all the forces of nature that were so influential. And then, processing that and figuring out how to create a visual language that expresses those feelings. And some of those feelings can be very complicated.  The technique, the means of expression is dictated by what those feelings are. It's not the other way around. People think – Oh, he used the liquid material and then he sort of danced around and that kind of gave him ideas. – No." Helen A. Harrison is the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center and an authority on 20th century American art. She is the author of Hamptons Bohemia and Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollack. In 1990, after serving as curator of the Parrish Art Museum, director of the Public Art Preservation Committee in Manhattan, and curator of Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton, she became the director of the Pollock-Krasner House, a National Historic Landmark museum and research collection in East Hampton. She has lectured widely at Stony Brook University, the School of Visual Arts, and other universities. For five years her visual art commentaries, “Art Waves,” were heard on NPR affiliate WLIU 88.3 FM. www.creativeprocess.info