In recent years, modern artist Jackson Pollock, also known as "Jack the Dipper" for his revolutionary technique that freed many from academic strictures, has become more and more famous. I am choosing to write about him because his work has been discussed around the holiday dinner table at family gatherings during the past year. I have also seen a lot of his work and I am beginning to understand why his paintings are considered so special. My favorite aunt is a curator for an art museum in Los Angeles and in the past year, she did a show on Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner. I had the opportunity to see some private collectors' collections of paintings by Jackson Pollock.
             Jackson Pollock was born in Wyoming but was raised in Arizona and California. In the late 1920s Jackson helped his father with a surveying job on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. This tells a lot about who Jackson Pollock was as an artist because he had a fear and fascination with vast open spaces, some people believe that this is when his fear and fascination began. During his childhood, Jackson and his brothers spent time studying Indian mounds near Phoenix near where their mother worked as a housekeeper. This experience is probably why Pollock used Indian symbols in some of his paintings.
             Jackson Pollock never finished high school because he left high school and Arizona to join his brother Charles Cecil Pollock at the Art Students League in New York. This move ended his time living in the west. At the Art Students League Pollock studied with Thomas Hart Benton a well-known artist of the Depression and Regionalist painter from Missouri. Benton was a huge influence on Pollock as an artist; he taught him that paintings were more about the experience than the resulting work. Benton promoted theories of rhythmic balance, dynamic sequence, and "muscular action patterns. Pollock used all of these techniques later in his work.
             Like many artists Pollock was t...