Pollock Pants

Jackson Pollock made quite a stir in the art world with his large, bold canvases of splatters, drips, and blobs of paint. Anyone so inclined can go to a Web site, click on the "Enter" link and create their very own virtual version of a Jackson Pollock painting, just as I did here...

Another one of those mysteries: Why were his paintings worth so much money? One tends to think -

Gee whiz, how much talent does that take? I mean, I could do that! My 5-year-old could do that!

Once when I was a kid and we were at the Natural History Museum and my Dad and I had climbed stairs and came into a gallery with a number of sculptures, including a large collection of scrap metal that had been welded together. There were lots of large and small car parts in the creation--tail pipes, mufflers, engine parts, transmission parts, that sort of thing. Now my Dad had a finely tuned sense of what was "art" and what was "not art," and being that he was an automobile mechanic and handled many of the objects in this sculpture day in and day out, he had an opinion about this particular piece of art:

What a piece of junk!

And he wasn't exactly whispering when he said it, either. I didn't agree with him, I loved it, but as the cliche goes, one man's junk is another man's treasure...

But back to Pollock. One of our yearly routines is to put away the summer clothes and haul out the winter clothes, which involves rooting around in storage tubs that are in various spots - the garage, the fruit cellar, under the bed, beside the bed, in the space we dub the "closet," but which is not really a proper closet at all.

Being the pack rat that I am, during the recent Getting Out the Winter Clothes, I found my painting clothes, an old pair of jeans and an old pair of tennis shoes that I wore when we added another room to the house some years back and I was required to perch on a scaffold the LOML had erected....

and paint Victorian Garnet on the second story eves.

I got quite a bit of paint on myself...

And I sat in quite a bit of paint as well...

and I figured there was no point in ruining any more clothes if I could get by with ruining just one pair.

Had I been a celebrity type and wearing these jeans on a high-profile street in New York City, there is a possibility I could have created a fashion craze, wherein everybody would want to pay lots of money so they too could wear paint-splattered pants and I would be very wealthy now.

Well, I decided not to save the pants or the tennis shoes for another year and they have been permanently retired. I have several good candidates waiting in the wings that will serve me well when painting time rolls around again.