Pollock

Paul likes pollock.

On the 11th of March of 2022, a grey morning, I was at the Lulu Island pizzeria, as three vendors, two South Asians and the Filipina, Rose, were busy making orders behind the counter. I had a Hawaiian slice and iced tea. Then, I went to the grocery store looking for dried anchovies, but there was none, according to the two Filipina workers there, so I bought instead five packets of frozen crab-flavoured wild pollock, or kamaboko, and a bag of frozen sole fillets. Then, I went to the cafe, where there was a long line. In front of me was a big boy in shorts, his meaty legs showing. A stocky man in a grey T-shirt and black track pants came in and out. An old man was reading an old book about the ice-hockey player Wayne Gretzky. Drinking my black iced tea, I sat near a table of a Bosnian couple, speaking Bosnian. The cafe music was multilingual, and I could hear Mexican lyrics,"Llorando, llorando, llorando": "Crying, crying, crying." An old man who was a regular before and had moved to White Rock gave me a little KitKat chocolate bar, wrapped in red paper. In the afternoon, I returned to the packed pizzeria to enjoy a pesto cheese slice and iced black diet cola. I could not sit in my usual corner. There were multiracial girl students, with expensive bubble teas. Outside near the greengrocery, white students walked by, saying, "We rather have salvation from suffering." It was drizzling.

His paintings are explosions of curving lines, shapes and colors. In his art you can see every movement that his arm made. You can see how he had to move his body around the canvas. Videos of Pollock painting show this process, which looks like a painterly dance.

In nineteen forty-four, Pollock married Lee Krasner who was also a skilled Abstract Expressionist painter.

Usually, Pollock would simply name his paintings with a number and a date. He did not want the titles to explain to viewers what to see when they looked at his work.

Pollock’s early works are similar to his teacher’s kind of painting.

Also, when he was in his late twenties, Pollock suffered a mental breakdown. It was caused in part by depression and dependence on alcohol. As a result, he was treated by a Jungian psychoanalyst.

You have Jackson Pollock who's known as this hard drinking, hard-driving artist who painted very spontaneous gestures in a high state of emotion, and then a colleague of his, Mark Rothko, painting quiet, contemplative works in a far less spontaneous way.

For nearly a quarter century, he caught cod, haddock, pollock, and flounders of various types. But then, he says "I guess we caught them all up."

"Maybe I'm a dumb Pollock. Is that too simple?" Krzyzewski's arguments were well-founded.