Oneness, Complexity, and the Distribution of Disease

n the floor, " said Jackson Pollock, " I feel more at ease. I feel nearer, more a part of the painting… I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting…. akin to the… Indian sand painters of the West " (1). Immediacy to the art work is hallmark of abstract expressionism or the New York School, a revolutionary art movement that shifted the center of artistic avant-garde from Europe to the United States. Born in the aftermath of World War II, this movement valued the inner world over external objects and articulated an emotional landscape fraught with uncertainty and despair. " Modern art to me is nothing more than the expression of contemporary aims of the age that we're living in, " Pollock wrote (1). The age was the postwar period, filled with anxiety, shocked by the atom bomb, changed by machines, immersed in Freudian theory and psychoanalysis , swinging with improvisational jazz. To this age, Pollock brought abstraction suited to his radical prototype, volatile personality, roughness, and impatience. Along with Willem De Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others, he elevated the act of painting, advocating that it should be as direct and fundamental as what it was trying to express and that it could, itself, promote emotional expression. " I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes….I prefer sticks, trowels , knives and dripping fluid paint or a heavy impasto with sand, broken glass… " (1), said Pollock about his expressive technique, which came to be known as action painting. The need to make an original statement, always at the heart of artistic and other human endeavor, permeated not only the subject matter of abstract expressionism but also its technical execution. Well-versed in the language of art, he knew and admired the work of Picasso, the surrealists, and Mexican muralists and experimented with several styles, seeking a new idiom. " I shall be an Artist of some kind. If nothing else I shall always study the Arts…, " wrote Pollock as a young man (2). He was born in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of 5 children and migrated with his family to Arizona and California, where he studied art at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles. At 18, he moved to New York City, settled in Greenwich Village, and enrolled in …