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But it's the forces of nature which feature so strongly in many of Pollock's major works - stand in front of Blue Poles and try not to get absorbed into the painting! Time Magazine critic, Robert Hughes, in 1982, made this observation: "It is impossible to make a forgery of Jackson Pollock's work. Lavender Mist about sums up his most ravishing, atmospheric painting…Pollock used the patterns caused by the separation and marbling of one enamel wet in another, the tiny black striations in the dusty pink, to produce an infinity of tones. It is what his imitators could never do, and why there are no successful Pollock forgeries; they always end up looking like… spaghetti, whereas Pollock - in his best work - had an almost preternatural control over the total effect of those skeins and receding depths of paint. In them, the light is always right. Nor are they absolutely spontaneous; he would often retouch the drip with a brush".

Alfonso Ossorio, Pollock's friend and patron said: "Here I saw a man who had both broken all the traditions of the past and unified them, who had gone beyond cubism, beyond Picasso and surrealism, beyond everything that had happened in art …His work expressed both action and contemplation". After marrying Lee Krasner and moving to a farmhouse in the rural end of Long Island, Pollock absorbed the meadows and woods near his property, which later infused into his great works.

Interestingly enough, studies have been done on Jackson Pollock's seminal painting, Blue Poles, (bought in 1973 by the Australian Government, amidst major controversy, for a then whopping $1.3 million - it's now worth $40 million) and Dr Richard Taylor, senior research fellow at the UNSW School of Physics, discovered: "The unique thing about Jackson Pollock was that he had abandoned using the brush on canvas and actually dripped the paint. That produced trajectories of paint on the canvas that were like a map or fingerprint of his motions around the canvas. I photographed Blue Poles at the National Gallery in Canberra. My colleagues and I analysed the trajectories in Blue Poles and a whole series of Pollock's paintings from 1943 to 1952. We scanned the photographs of Blue Poles into a computer so we could break it down into its different colours… trajectories to see exactly what pattern is lying there. We find the patterns are composed of fractals. Many patterns in nature are made up of these fractals and they are very distinguishable from man-made patterns. They are more elaborate and complex."

Dr Taylor said Pollock would not have been consciously aware that he was duplicating patterns of nature. Instead, the imagery poured from fractal patterns encoded within his subconscious. However, this mathematical analysis does a disservice to the immense artistic influence of Pollock on the whole concept of art in the mid 20th century. Ultimately, Pollock couldn't control his demons and some of his later work couldn't match the genius of what had come before. But he left the world the legacy of a bright shining moment in the sun when anything in art seemed possible.

Marika Bryant

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