Time & Perspective Quote by Jackson Pollock

Pollock is doing two things at once here: swatting away the lazy caricature of him as the guy who only “splattered,” and quietly reclaiming authorship over what people call accident. He concedes the obvious - yes, he’s representational “some of the time” - but the real move is the second clause, where he reframes representation as an inevitability, not a choice. If the unconscious is driving, “figures are bound to emerge.” The line turns abstract expressionism from a formal rebellion into a psychological one.

The subtext is defensive and canny. Mid-century critics loved to file artists into neat stylistic boxes, and Pollock’s public myth had already hardened: rugged American genius, pure abstraction, the end of the figure. He punctures that myth without abandoning it. “A little all of the time” suggests that even at his most nonobjective, his canvases retain the gravitational pull of bodies, gestures, and spatial cues. He’s arguing that figuration isn’t a retreat to tradition; it’s a symptom, a leak.

Context matters: Pollock is speaking from inside a culture newly fluent in Freud and newly anxious about meaning. Abstract painting was accused of being empty, decorative, or fraudulent. Pollock answers: you want content? It’s there, but it arrives sideways, through the psyche rather than illustration. The genius of the quote is that it licenses viewers to see “figures” without turning the work into a Rorschach free-for-all. He’s not saying anything goes; he’s saying something insists.