Portrait And A Dream Pollock Analysis

“Portrait and a Dream” was made using oil enamel on canvas through action painting, and it was located on the 1st floor in the “Museum is History” gallery. Looking at the map it’s on the 1st level where it says “contemporary art”. The “Portrait and a Dream” is very large and it actually gets its on entire wall on the gallery. Basically the piece is divided into two distinct parts: one side involves a lot of squiggly black lines jumbled up together in a chaotic manner; I call this side the “dream side”. And the other part of the piece is represents what appears to be a very abstract portrait of a female face using colors like red, orange, yellow, and of course black; I call this side the “portrait side”. To me the artwork represented the chaos and disorder represented in people’s dreams, deepest thoughts, and dearest hopes in contrast to the more colorful and more relatable and conservative outward appearance we show everyone. Taking a deeper look at the visual elements present in this piece you see lines and contour lines are used throughout the piece from the “dream side” where black lines, thick and thin alike, run across the canvas. Shape is used where you can see the shape of a human face on the “portrait side” of the piece. The colors red, orange, and yellow are used on the “portrait side” side of the piece, and black is used throughout, and looking at

This is yet another abstract nonrepresentational piece by Pollock where he used slashes of enamel paint that he slung on the paper. To me it looked as if Pollock was trying to express in his artwork a message, however that message was written in a language only he could denote. This made me think of how sometimes you feel a certain way but you are not able to express it through more traditional forms of media or art. Some of the visual elements used our contour lines used throughout the portrait, value contrasts between thick buldges of enamel paint to thin smears, and the color black which is the only color used adding to the mystery theme of the overall piece. Some principles of design I observed were balance and harmony. The piece is seemingly balanced, visually you can divide the piece into 3 parts and each part has a blob of black calligraphy type application of slung enamel paint. The piece is in harmony as Pollock uses similar type lines throughout. In fact the style of lines to me are so in harmony it looks as if it were some type of written message in a language only known by