Biographies: Manetas and Pollock :: Curriculum

Video Production Model

Units:

Biographies: Manetas and Pollock

Part of Lesson Plan: Artist Emulation: Film Director and Visual Artist

Activity Overview / Details

Key Term:

Emulate: to imitate or reproduce the style of another in an original work

Read and discuss the biographies of artists, Manetas and Pollock:

Miltos Manetas:

Miltos Manetas began making paintings In 1995, some time after he had become a devotee of computers and mastered image-processing software, so it is no surprise that laptops, Zip drives, data cables, and digital-game components populate his works. But beyond providing subjects for still lifes and props for figure studies, the "coolness" of computer technology, its cut-and-paste power over images, has led the artist to an analogous casualness about the vocabulary of painting that permits him to freely sample styles of rendering and strategies of composition.

Jackson Pollock:

American painter, the commanding figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

This manner of Action painting had in common with Surrealist theories of automatism that it was supposed by artists and critics alike to result in a direct expression or revelation of the unconscious moods of the artist. Pollock's name is also associated with the introduction of the All-over style of painting which avoids any points of emphasis or identifiable parts within the whole canvas and therefore abandons the traditional idea of composition in terms of relations among parts. The design of his painting had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas -- indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image. All these characteristics were important for the new American painting which matured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.