Chaos

I know this is supposed to be a feminist blog, buuuuuut... it's my blog so I can't do whatever I want. This week, I was thinking a lot about Jackson Pollock. I know I'm weird, but thinking about art is my favorite distraction. More specifically, I was contemplating the question that has carried on through out my college years and now beyond; what makes Pollock's work so beautiful. He has always been one of my favorites but I am well aware of the many people who just don't understand/ like his work. And I don't blame them! It looks like a mess any one of my nieces or nephews has made in the last week. But the one consistent claim in favor of his work is that it is balanced. My art history teacher once challenged our class to try and make a "Jackson Pollock" of our own. It was a great experiment, and each student came back with a downcast face giving away its unexpected difficulty. Balance is Pollock's leg up on my nieces and nephews. But really, balance isn't a good enough answer to why his work is so touching.

As I was thinking about this piece, Autumn Rhythm I finally realized, its unexplainable beauty is what makes it so important. It is a part of abstract expressionism which came out of the 50's- after the country had experienced 2 World Wars and a Great Depression. People didn't know how to recover from their devastation, so they used art to express something that words could not- the human experience. There is a sense of spirituality about it for me. It dawned on me while I was working- filing away- that my life is a lot like this piece. Many look at it and see only a mess, there seems to be no order and nothing special about it- but that's what makes it so beautiful. There IS an order to it, an order that only some can see. Out of all of the chaos, God is creating a masterpiece of order. Only He can do that. So bring on the black lines of disappointment and difficulty, it just makes the white lines of happiness and joy that much more noticeable.