Jackson Pollock

Pollock grew up as the youngest of five sons in a family that moved often through the American West. His father worked as a farmer and later a surveyor, and the household's frequent relocations took the children across Arizona and California. As a teenager in Los Angeles he enrolled at Manual Arts High School, where an interest in drawing and art history began to take hold, though he was eventually expelled.

In 1930 Pollock moved to New York City and studied at the Art Students League under the American regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, whose emphasis on rhythm and composition stayed with him. During the Depression he worked for the federal Works Progress Administration art project. Early canvases were figurative and influenced by Benton, the Mexican muralists, and the Surrealist idea of tapping the unconscious, an interest reinforced by the Jungian therapy he underwent in the late 1930s.

The mid-1940s brought a turning point. The art patron Peggy Guggenheim commissioned a large work, Mural (1943), and gave him shows at her Art of This Century gallery. In 1945 he married the painter Lee Krasner, and the couple moved to a farmhouse in Springs, on Long Island's East Hampton, where he gained space for large-scale work. Around 1947 he began laying unstretched canvas on the floor and pouring, dripping and splattering commercial enamel paint, building dense webs of color that recorded the physical act of painting.

This approach produced the works that defined his reputation, among them Full Fathom Five, Number 1A, 1948, Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) and Lavender Mist. In 1949 Life magazine ran a feature famously asking whether he was the greatest living painter in the United States, bringing his radical methods to a mass audience. As a leader of Abstract Expressionism alongside painters such as Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, he helped establish New York as a center of modern art.

Pollock's later years were troubled by heavy drinking and erratic health, and his output slowed. On August 11, 1956, he died in a car crash near his home in Springs; a passenger, Edith Metzger, was also killed. Although his active career was short, his floor-based, gesture-driven painting reshaped ideas about what a picture could be and influenced generations of later artists.

Jackson Pollock was born on January 28, 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, United States. In Cardology (Destiny Cards), January 28, 1912 corresponds to the Queen of Clubs, making the Queen of Clubs his Birth Card.

In numerology, the name adds another layer to the birth-date profile. The letters of a person’s name are used to explore inner motivation, personality, expression, and the qualities they bring into relationships and everyday life. Explore how his original name Paul Jackson Pollock influences his life and personality.