Art & Creativity Quote by Jackson Pollock

Pollock’s “further away” is doing the real work here: it’s not just a stylistic preference, it’s a deliberate act of desertion. The easel, the palette, the brush - those aren’t neutral objects. They’re the furniture of European tradition, the props that quietly enforce a hierarchy: the painter stands apart, the canvas behaves, the image resolves into something legible and ownable. By naming the tools so plainly, Pollock treats them like outdated etiquette, the kind you drop when you’re trying to invent a new social order.

The intent is procedural and philosophical at once. Pollock isn’t announcing a new “look” so much as a new relationship between body, paint, and surface. Removing the easel puts the canvas on the floor, turning painting into an arena rather than a window. Abandoning the brush makes the mark less about drawing and more about event: pour, fling, drip, drag - gestures that record time and motion, not just composition. The subtext is that authorship is being renegotiated. He’s still in control, but it’s a control that invites gravity, viscosity, and accident to co-sign the result.

Context matters: postwar America wanted cultural primacy, and Abstract Expressionism became a kind of hard-edged optimism - the claim that the “new world” could also be the new art. Pollock’s retreat from tools is also a retreat from inherited authority, and a bet that authenticity can be staged through process. The shock isn’t that he stopped using brushes; it’s that he made the refusal itself into a method.