Victoria #2 Print

Victoria #4 Gesture painting is a way to bring the act of painting into the work itself is also called action painting and abstract expressionism. Action painters, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Bradley Walker Tomlin, and Jack Tworkov echo the sway of the “automatic” techniques first used by the Surrealists in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s. Following their example, I chiefly intended to use this method to open my artist’s intuitive imaginative powers, giving me liberty to involve myself without restraint. Action painting is a direct impulsive and decidedly forceful type of painting that employs a spur-of-the-moment application of strong, all-encompassing brushstrokes and the happenstance results of dripping and spilling paint onto the support. The term “action-painting” was first used by the American art critic Harold Rosenberg to differentiate the art of an assemblage of American Abstract Expressionists who used that process starting in about 1950. Action painting, also called gesture painting, is set apart from the cautiously defined paintings of the “abstract imagists” and “color-field” painters, which represents the other key track contained in Abstract Expressionism and resembles Action painting only in its complete fidelity to unregulated individual expression free of all conventional artistic and shared aesthetic principles.