Art and the Artist - Charlie Grimes

For my response, I decided to relate the Wallace Stevens poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" to the Jackson Pollack quote:
"It doesn’t make much difference how the pain is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement."

Throughout the course of "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the speaker describes thirteen different scenes involving blackbirds in some way, ranging from straightforward depictions of nature to abstract statements about blackbirds and humans becoming one. The thirteen stanzas are loosely linked by their mention of blackbirds, and it is clear that the speaker has an immense appreciation for the creature and its complexity that often goes unnoticed. For instance, the speaker asks a group of people "Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see how the blackbird walks around the feet of the women about you?" I see this line as a sort of comment on how people long to experience beauty in life, but fail to see simple beauties right in front of them. Regardless of how you interpret the thirteen individual stanzas, the author presents several different intriguing views of the same object, which fits in with the quote above. Jackson Pollack, being an abstract expressionist who created drip paintings and other abnormal works, was in the business of communicating messages in different ways than traditional art. Like Pollack, Stevens crafts a multitude of unique images of blackbirds to express emotion in different ways, whether the emotion be fear (stanza 11) or fascination (stanza 5). Pollack's quote also fits in with my thoughts about art, as I love abstract visual art and experimental music, both of which are forms of art that express something in varied, abstract, and intriguing ways. It is not necessarily important to me how a message in art is expressed, because what really matters is that it evokes emotion in you.