It was Janel Sobel instead of Jackson Pollock...

Placing this story within the history of the dripping technique, I begin, for the moment in an understandable way, by talking about Janel Sobel instead of Jackson Pollock, in order to illustrate the life and artistic journey of a painter, who, still under-appreciated, actually drastically changed the fortunes of the art world, as well as the abstract approach of the aforementioned and well-known American master. Sobel was an abstract expressionist painter born in 1893 in Dnipro, present-day Ukraine, to a Jewish family, which, unfortunately, lost the head of the family during a bloody pogrom, a riot from which the artist was forced to take refuge in New York with her mother and siblings. Her difficult life did not lead her, initially, to approach art, a discipline for which she, although she nurtured an inordinate love and interest, had to set aside to devote herself to her five children, whom she had from her marriage to a goldsmith at the age of sixteen. It was her offspring, however, who offered her the opportunity to reawaken her dormant passion, so much so that Sobel began painting at the age of forty-four encouraged by her teenage son, who, as a kind of "Pygmalion," recognized his mother's talent and promoted her artistic development. From this time on, Sobel began to paint in her Brighton Beach (New York) apartment, giving free rein to her "virgin" creativity, i.e., self-taught, through the use of her children's art materials, including paper cutouts, envelopes, pieces of cardboard, shells found on the beach, etc. The motives for these procedures often converged in shaping the memories of his childhood, rendered through quotations from Ukrainian folk art, regional customs, traditional Jewish families, etc., sometimes also painted through the use of innovative invented automatic techniques, which gave rise to abstract compositions close to some methods employed by Surrealist painting. In this context it is worth highlighting how, if her early works, marked by a prevalent primitivist poetry, were marked by dreamlike forms floating on enchanted landscapes worthy of the example of the slightly older Chagall, her later ones moved from a more ambiguous amorphous expressive cadence, to Surrealist impulses, to pure abstraction, in which, for the first time in the history of art, Sobel invented the technique of dripping by experimenting with the use of a dropper. Yes, you read that right, the history of art, as it has always been told, reports a major inaccuracy, often singling out the figure Jackson Pollock, also known sympathetically as Jack the Dripper, as the originator of the aforementioned way of making paint communicate with the medium. Despite this shock, it is good not to forget how it was the work of the American artist that brought to the fore the aforementioned technique, which, for the first time, was effectively linked to the world of the unconscious, as a revelatory tool, capable of giving form, through the impulses of the physical act of painting, to a gesture with highly emotional power, capable of revealing the deep motions of being. In addition, the latter master did not hide that he drew inspiration from Sobel, just as he declared in 1961, the year in which art critic Clement Greenber would write, "Pollock admitted that Sobel's paintings had impressed him."

SAMSON (2022) Painting by Ykstreetart.

ENJOY BLUE BACKGROUND (2022) Painting by Michael Edery.

Sobel / Pollock comparison

After this revelation, for which I am sure you will not sleep tonight, I feel it is appropriate to compare the work of the aforementioned masters, through a comparison aimed at involving technique, chromaticism and subjects, which were realized in some of the masterpieces indicated below, first and foremost, Sobel's Milky way (1945) and Pollock's Galaxy (1947). In the first painting, materialized through a rapid and spontaneous mode of realization, dripping is placed against a multicolored background, where it comes to life intertwining in shades of pink and yellow, the latter color, detectable, this time exclusively and predominantly, also in the aforementioned 1947 work. Beyond the technical and chromatic affinities, the very titles of the paintings take us back to the immensity of the universe, which, in the case of the American painter, took shape from a dripping brush, which deliberately did not cover the entire layer of paint underneath, on which the artist also inserted small pieces of gravel, in order to increase its consistency. Purely chromatic affinities, on the other hand, can be found between Sobel's Untitled (JS-015) (1946-48) and Pollock's Free Form (1946), where the presence of red and black imposes itself, although in the Ucranian painter's work it is the blood color that overpowers all the others, while in the American's painting it is the black that says the last, imposing itself as the highest layer of the composition. Thinking only of Sobel for a moment, in the same year she produced two other works in which red played a prominent role, such as, for example, Untitled (1946) and Untitled (1946-1948), which, when viewed all three together, appear to be a gradual escalation of predominance of the aforementioned hue. Returning to the "Sobel versus Pollock" I propose to compare the animal, resembling an anthropomorphic fox, of Untitled (1947) by the Dnipro painter, with the beasts immortalized by Jackson's Mural (1943), since, in the latter case in particular, the American master's faunal abstraction would probably have preceded Sobel's. Speaking of Mural, in fact, it gives form, by means of signs that intertwine on a white background, to lines, letters and animal faces, which, highly stylized, are intended to describe the precipitous flight of beasts from the plains of West America, inspired by Native American artistic manifestations and Mexican murals. Concluding with the human figure, three large stylized faces, made in shades of predominantly pink and red, animate Sobel's Untitled (1946), while, to recognize the human figure in Pollock's mostly abstract work we have to go back to 1942, the year of the creation of The Moon Woman, a painting aimed at testifying how in his early work the artist was strongly influenced by Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, as well as making his own the Surrealist concept of the unconscious as a source of art. Finally, the story about Pollock continues in contemporary art, where his work will be compared, this time, with the pictorial investigation of Artmajeur artists such as: Dam Domido, Carolina Vis, and Emily Starck.

ORANGE (2017) Painting by Alessandro Butera.

YELLOW DRIPPING (2023) Painting by Dam Domido.

Dam Domido: Yellow dripping

Dam Domino's pictorial creativity is placed, from an artistic historical point of view, within the research carried out by Abstract Expressionism, a movement inclusive, inescapably, of the dripping technique, which is often the protagonist of the works of the aforementioned artist. Precisely through the latter manner, the acrylic, or oil, falls from Domino's brush intuitively, in order to synthesize, also through the use intense nuances, fragments of feelings, which are carefully researched, caught and captured by the painter. The goal, the synthesis of the whole, is the achievement of a more authentic subjectivity, which is made explicit through the most total rendering of the tonal and rhythmic freedom of pictorial creation. Such externalization is found, for example, in Domino's Yellow dripping, a work to be understood as a pure synthesis of the energy of the gesture, which I identified, somewhat creatively, as a kind of "zoom," that is, a more synthetic detail, of a masterpiece, which, in addition to being larger in size, is characterized by a greater overlapping of the pictorial layer: Pollock's Blue Poles Number 11 (1952). About the latter, on the triangular pictorial field a series of gestural interventions have been arranged, comprising multiple orientations, within which, drippings, skeins and tangles of colored lines are identified. In such a fabric of liquid and curvilinear traces, eight dark vertical forms are identified, which, as per the title, could be identifiable objects of the real, i.e., poles, which have been interpreted to be likened to the "silhouettes" of totem poles or the tall masts of ships.

EMOTOGRAPH (I) (2022) Painting by Aatmica Ojha.

Aatmica Ojha: Emotograph

Dripping is also a fundamental part of the abstractionism of Aatmica Ojha, an artist born in 1989 who uses and experiments with the technique, not only through the more classical dripping motion, but even through more solid and compact painting. The painter, who is self-described as an halfway between spontaneous and planned creation, and whose work is avowedly focused on the search for beauty, has himself created the word that gives the work its title, namely Emotograph, which Ojha says would mean "emotion graph," a concept to be understood as a black-and-white artistic procedure aimed at combining dripping and flow. The latter term refers to that particular and heartfelt passion/inspiration, which drives the process of artistic creation, to be understood as a fertile moment, in which ideas and intuitions, which flow faster, give a satisfaction, as well as an intense fusion, with what we are doing. Such intuitive and primordial dripping necessarily brings us back to Pollock's example, in that the very chromatic gathering of Emotograph seems to be followed by a hypothetical explosion, aimed at separating the distribution of black and white on the support more closely, just as it happens in the chromatically akin Number 23 (1947) by the American master. Speaking of the latter masterpiece, the painting on paper is composed of layered skeins of black and white enameled paint, the composition of which was created by dripping and flowing color onto the support from all four sides, a technique that nicely rendered the idea of a sense of frenetic movement inherent in the image, visible from different orientations of the latter.

CRITICISM IS EASIER THAN PRACTICE (2022) Painting by Emily Starck.

Emily Starck: Criticism is easier then practice

Emily Starck is a self-taught abstract painter who, in trying her hand at various techniques, has necessarily had to confront a legendary one, namely the one pioneered by Max Ernst, developed by Janel Sobel and formalized by Pollock: the aforementioned dripping. Although little remains now to be said about the latter technique much discussed above, a food for thought is provided to us by the very title of the Artmajeur artist's work, which is perfect for summarizing an age-old trend that today finds a place especially in social media. "Criticizing is easier than doing," criticizing is easier than being, criticizing is easier than thinking, this is what comes to our minds when we read comments on Instagram, where everyone pretends to be an expert, without even having the cognizance of what is going on in the head, life, wallet, etc., of the person appearing on the screen. Such superficiality, translated into artistic language is as follows: the Pollock dripping I could have done it too! It is precisely to these insidious voices that Starck most likely wanted to respond, wanting to suggest to those who do not reserve good words for his work, to respond with the brush, rather than with the mouth. Returning to art history, the chromatics of Criticism is easier then practice, executed predominantly in black and white, bring to mind multiple works by Pollock, such as, for example: Greyed Rainbow (1953), Number 32 (1950), Yellow Islands (1952).