Action Jackson

Originally published in the US in 2002, this is an authoritative account of the life of the pioneering abstract expressionist painter, Jackson Pollock. Pollock turned the art world upside down in his short life with his revolutionary ‘action paintings’. Here, his life and work are nicely distilled through carefully chosen words and pictures. The narrative images are supplied by award-winning artist Robert Andrew Parker, who knew Pollock as a young man. Parker is a good choice, his gestural drawings providing an ideal balance of pictorial representation and a reflection of the movement and ‘action’ in Pollock’s work. The text is sensitively written, introducing the reader to Pollock’s work through the everyday, ordinary activities of his life and thoughts, building up a sense of the ideas and reflections that informed the development of his paintings. The clear, crisp design, full of fresh white space, provides an appropriate backdrop for the focus of the book, the artist’s work. MS