It looks really good. Like, really good.
I have one thing that throws me, though: if you keep drawing over the same section, you don't get more coverage. It always looks like the first pass.
But I'm so surprised at how well this works to emulate chalk.
I need this combined with Excalidraw somehow and I would be so happy. There's something so viscerally satisfying about chalkboards, even virtual. Thanks for this! You did a phenomenal job on the chalk effect.
I meant more: two of the same category of thing, where a submission will spur interest in closely related submissions, or something tangential related.
Like, say, a submission on Jean-Michel Basquiat‘s art follow by a submission on the 27 Club.
Pollock used a lot of connected ink splotches, Steadman's 'inkling' stuff is usually large white-space separated splotches, an effect that is impossible with this tool.
also Steadman moved away from that eventually, whereas Pollock leaned into it until death.
Moreover Pollocks' art was the splotches, whereas it was usually an accoutrement for Steadman around a different -- usually framed -- perspective.
Agreed, super cool project. All it seems like it would need for a full pollock vibe would be a color palette selector. And maybe this audio track on loop and a transparent overlay of animated cigarette smoke. Great url.
I absolutely love this and here's why: many people who criticize art as being "child's doodles" lack the experience and process of art. Education raises all boats. This is that type of simple education.
So now, I hope every here tries to make their own Pollock art.
Because Pollock would smash it with a masterpiece right out of his cellphone? This is cute but not a great device to reveal the truth to the uneducated
I think what he would do is better than what most others would.
This reminds me of something that happened to me in the early 90s. I went to a local computer show (where local distributors would show new hardware) with a friend who's an artist. There was a booth with a color Mac, probably an LC or something like that, running Mac Paint. People were doodling on it, playing around with the spray can and the text tool, and it looked like random stuff thrown on a canvas. Not having a computer at home, my friend was curious, and queued to play with it.
When my friend got a turn on the Mac, first time on a Mac using Mac Paint, he made a drawing that genuinely looked like a piece of art. If there had been a printer nearby, I could have printed it out and put it on my wall, and nobody would have thought that this was a somebody's first time using Mac Paint.
Art is a genuine skill, and you will see the difference between an artist and a random person regardless of the canvas they use.
I guess this also reminds me of the introduction of the Amiga, with Warhol using the paint can to fill in sections of a photo of Debbie Harry. Technically, this is something everybody can do, but Warhol knew which colors to pick, which sections to color, and which choices to make to create something that actually looks great.
Jackson Pollock's style evolved throughout his life. The Whitney had a show with his early works and it's nothing like his splatter painting style we all know[1].
> Here's a topic I don't see people engaging with: I could in principle make the same kinds of completely abstract paintings Pollock did, but if I do it, it won't be art because I'm not in the art world. I have no access to galleries, I have no patrons, and I generally don't move in those circles, so I have no ability to be taken seriously for doing it.
Interesting that people miss that so much of art is about the idea, not the execution. Most musicians can play a beatles song (ex. thousands of dead on cover bands), anyone can take a photo (ex. see shot on iPhone campaign), a lot of people can paint the mona lisa or other famous art (ex. see faked paintings).
It's that someone had the wild thought to do it in the first place.
A cynical take is that people are just so far away from the level that they see the execution as the difficult part. Like saying, I could type out the linux kernal.
No, my point is that even if I had the idea (abstract art) I wouldn't be taken seriously as an artist because my art would never make it into galleries. I'm not in the art world, so it doesn't matter what my ideas are.
In terms of distribution or fitting in, this is not unique to you or this moment in time. Art has always been this way, even worse back in the day of having to get a painting in the Salons in Paris where it was judged by a few people. It's actually more common for this to be the case, as a truly unique idea doesn't fit in the the critics opinion of "art" ex. painters who only get famous years after death.
There are not many things in life that you can just "be good at" and the world unlocks. Even as an athlete, something very meritocratic, you have to convince someone to hire you onto a team and if you don't do it the correct way (college -> NBA/NFL) no one will care because you're not in the right "circles"
I don't know, but the commenter would be wrong. Art is art regardless of its credibility in "the art world," whatever that means. I suppose they meant they couldn't be as famous as Jackson Pollock for doing what he did, which seems to be confusing the value of art with the value of celebrity (the "ability to be taken seriously".)
What made Jackson Pollock's work art was the intent behind it. What made him and others like him famous was the CIA (as inevitably mentioned elsewhere in this thread.)
Of topics like these my father, a lover of all things art and photography, would say: "It doesn't matter if it's bad, and it doesn't matter that anyone can do it; he was the one who did it first."
I don't agree with your dad. Whether something is good (a notoriously loaded question) and whether it's easy for anyone to do themselves matter a great deal. Being the first person to do something abhorrent would not be praiseworthy, nor would being the first to do something uninteresting. Pollock may well have been the first to do what he did, but it is still low effort slop that any three year old could trivially reproduce. Therefore he gets no points for being first, because he didn't do something worth doing to begin with.
This feels unnecessarily harsh - I can understand thinking Pollock shouldn't be as decorated or recognized, but "not worth doing to begin with" seems to cast a judgement on him having created something that feels mean-sprited. It's not as if Pollock was causing harm to others by making his pieces. I have plenty of friends who work out their stresses and needs to create by making things that will never be in a museum or sell for money. They may not even qualify for your approval as "art". Many are equally non-representational - just a mix of colors that struck their mood that day on a canvas. That doesn't mean they're not worth doing for them or maybe for those who care about them and received a piece of their work. I find some of them beautiful for reasons I can't explain.
The critique of if Pollock should be canonized as "a great artist" is and should be a different discussion. As far as I know, he wasn't out there trying to get his works in museums. Dismissing something he clearly cared about and had passion for as a complete waste of his life is insane to me. As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, he was decidedly capable of other works that were more representational, but decided that he wanted to express himself in this way. This wasn't some hack with no other skills who got lucky.
People seem confused about the UI. You don't need to click, just move. Most keys on the keyboard correspond to a color. Shift + those keys sets the background.
I like it that there's no hint, it just rewards exploration and experimentation.
I've commented [0] on some of the hidden features (changing foreground and background colors with <letter/number> and <shift + letter/number> respectively) but also to note is there's some nice ascii art in the raw source (though the main bit is cut out by HN filters): view-source:https://jacksonpollock.org
I remember when the Jacksonpollock.org first came online there was a bit of drama around the fact that Miltos Manetas had taken Stamen’s original Flash file (well known within the flash community at the time but not so much outside) and re-hosted it without credit or permission. They sorted it out and Stamen were credited in the end but it opened my eyes to how much of contemporary art it’s actually marketing. (With reference here to Manetas not Pollock)
"Canvas was initially introduced by Apple for use in their own Mac OS X WebKit component in 2004,[1] powering applications like Dashboard widgets and the Safari browser. Later, in 2005, it was adopted in version 1.8 of Gecko browsers,[2] and Opera in 2006,[3] and standardized by the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) on new proposed specifications for next generation web technologies.[4]
To think that someone actually made a lucrative career out of the analogue version of this. I suppose it was one step above hanging a blank canvas with a pretentious caption underneath.
"By 1989 Bacon was the most expensive living artist after one of his triptychs sold at Sotheby's for over US$6 million."
And:
"He died of a heart attack on 28 April 1992, aged 82. He bequeathed his estate (then valued at £11 million) to his heir and sole legatee John Edwards."
It's a lot of fun building these kinds of things. I made this a few years ago and got obsessed with modelling bezier curves for individual bristles and tweaking the tiny details of blend modes https://react-artboard.netlify.app/
someone, once, attached different paint brushes to the branches of a tree, that could touch a canvas placed below.
The completely random, but compelling results, resemble nothing so much as a pollock
one of the few mad artists that I admire there work.
Also have lived with paintings done in his studio by an X's relative, who was attempting the same style, but in no way achiving what pollock himself did.
I do have a few random unknown artist works, that come close, and have a partial back story on two, and they were also, mad!
Mad but precious, and in this time there is little physical and financial room for people and the subculters they create to thrive, and so we are impoverished.
The app is cute, but it trivialises what was a huge reach into the unknown.
Fun fact! Jackson Pollock, along with other abstract expressionists, was a CIA propaganda asset!
The CIA believed that abstract expressionism, with its unbound and individualistic style, could be associated with American freedoms, so they secretly funded the "Congress for Cultural Freedom", an anti-communist advocacy group that promoted American arts and culture, including abstract expressionism, through international art shows and publications.
Art or writings that touched on US racism (Pollock was contemporaneous with numerous lynchings) and imperialism (Guatemala, Iran, Greece, Korea) were, of course, passed over.
Ever since I learned this, I have lost all emotional appreciation for his works. While before they seemed free, now they seem cheap.
> Ever since I learned this, I have lost all emotional appreciation for his works. While before they seemed free, now they seem cheap.
I don't understand this. Because he got paid for it, the work is cheap? Do you think he would've made different works if the CIA hadn't funded his art shows? I struggle to imagine what a Pollock "about" racism would look like, and how the CIA would notice that it's about racism.
I mean you do you, I don't mean to tell you you can't dislike someone's art. I just really don't get it :D
It reeks of the same stench as cancel culture. Once some people have seen a connection to something they dont like, they just cant bring themselves to enjoy that thing anymore. I guess those sorts of people like to fixate on what they hate.
the main reason why I el-you-vee love this is that it's what my first sketches in processing ( minus the obligatory "random" color generation on every mouse click ( somehow those colors where never really random ) ) plus some algo for extra splotches around curves, it looks like. a very simple starting point elevated to a super cool thing.
Pollock’s art is not just random splashes but a sophisticated interaction of movement, gravity, and fluid dynamics, creating fractal-like structures. This fractal nature might contribute to why people find his work visually compelling—it resonates with patterns we see in nature.
It's not any more random than where you happen to be standing in relation to the clouds at sunset. There's plenty of days that doesn't have any emotional resonance to me, but some days it does. I wouldn't dwell on it, and if you happen to see a piece in person some day, maybe it strikes you differently.
I haven't spent much time with Pollock, but I've seen an awful lot of Rothkos. Very different style but similar levels of "that looks like it took no thought and has nothing to say".
I'm content to say Rothko isn't for me, but I'll reserve judgment on Pollock until I can spend more time in those galleries.
That is a really good point. I've put a lot of effort into understanding things that didn't appeal and some of them are now very meaningful to me. I thought literature was absurd and now I direct Shakespeare plays.
This is a fun toy. I have no problem naming toys after the serious people and things that inspired it. For all I know, that is exactly what the author of this toy intended to do. Toy isn’t even a denigrating term — play is critically important to many things, especially in visual art.
What gets old is the hubris of the tech world thinking that an artist’s intention and methods boil down to a superficial ‘style’— devoid of granular stroke-by-stroke intention, context, or meaning which you can apply to any arbitrary subject or setting to effectively create new works by that artist.
Pollock's "art" is generous. The guy splashed random paint around. Buyers would come in and point to the section that "spoke" to them. He'd cut out that section, sign it, and extract thousands from these idiots. Actually, good for him come to think of it.
Here's a topic I don't see people engaging with: I could in principle make the same kinds of completely abstract paintings Pollock did, but if I do it, it won't be art because I'm not in the art world. I have no access to galleries, I have no patrons, and I generally don't move in those circles, so I have no ability to be taken seriously for doing it.
It would be still be art but no, you wouldn't be taken seriously.
To some extent succeeding at art is by definition succeeding in those circles, whether through politics, a chance patron or gallery owner fixating on you, raw unignorable talent, etc. A related definition is succeeding by sheer popularity and fame, like a Banksy, though he's succeeded in both ways. I don't think this insight undermines the art world wholesale, though it definitely suggests (correctly) that luck plays role, that not all great artists succeed, and that not all successful artists are great. Most games in life are like this.
I think part of what makes an artist stand out in a medium like this is that they are able to stand out in a medium like this.
Going and seeing something like “the fountain” (Duchamp) is surely accompanied by many people remarking “I could have made that” and it could be true, but they didn’t. And that’s the difference.
To some degree that accessibility makes some of these things even more interesting.
I brought up a Dadaism piece on purpose. In fascism, one tool of the leaders was to declare some art pure and acceptable and some as “not art.” Dadaism was a rebuke of the idea: that authority can or cannot tell us what art is and isn’t.
Dadaism is intentionally absurdist. And it’s that quality that many would use to discredit it, is the very thing that makes it so powerful (to some).
Not saying that pollock is playing with absurdism, but saying that sometimes the things that make something “not art” or “not interesting” to one person are the things that elevate it to another.
Not sure if that’s what you were asking, but that’s a riff I was inspired to share.
Thanks. It seems that some UTF-8 characters are not accepted as part of the comment. Anyone who wants to see the rabbit should check the page source :)
After many experiments, the most realistic was painting a thick line and then erasing tiny randomly sized rectangles out of it.