28 January: Jackson Pollock

The artist Jackson Pollock was born on this date in 1912. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. He was born in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five brothers, and was named Paul Jackson Pollock.
2. He was usually quiet and introspective, but struggled with alcohol addiction, and was a completely different person when drunk, becoming aggressive and violent. In fact, people would buy him drinks just to see what he got up to when inebriated.
3. He’s famous for a technique called drip painting in which paint is dripped or poured onto the canvas, with the artist often using their own body and frenetic movements, like dancing. Another word used for it was action painting. Jackson Pollock is the most famous practitioner of drip painting, and was dubbed “Jack the Dripper” by Time magazine.
4. Pollock would give his paintings numbers, rather than names, so people would appreciate the painting for what it was and not try to find images in them.
5. His paintings get sold for insane amounts of money. In 2016, Pollock's painting titled Number 17A was reported to have fetched US$200 million.
6. Which brings us to the tale of Teri Horton, a truck driver from California. In 1992 she bought a painting for $5 to cheer up a friend. The friend didn’t like it, so Horton decided to sell it on at a yard sale. A local art teacher suggested to her that the $5 painting might be the work of Jackson Pollock. She is said to have replied, “Who the $&% Is Jackson Pollock?” which would become the title of the documentary about her subsequent research and quest to find out, by means of forensic experts, whether it actually was one of his. While the forensic experts concluded it was, the art world is still undecided. Meanwhile, Horton hung on to the painting, declining offers of $2 million and $9 million for it.
7. One of Pollock’s paintings has a fly in it. As he largely painted in an outbuilding of his home in East Hampton, insects would often get in and get stuck on the canvas. One fly’s final resting place is encased in paint in Number 31, 1950, which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
8. Physicist Richard Taylor conducted computer analysis of Pollock’s paintings in 1992 and concluded that the fractal dimensions of Pollock’s earlier drip paintings closely resemble those found in nature. Pollock may have had some inkling this might be the case, as he once said, “I am Nature”. Moreover, the term Fractal Expressionism has been coined to describe Pollock’s painting style.
9. Despite having numerous exhibitions abroad, Pollock never travelled outside of the United States.
10. Pollock’s alcohol abuse would eventually be the death of him. He died aged 44 in 1956 in a single-car crash in his Oldsmobile convertible when driving under the influence.

Character birthday

Chain, aka Gary Winchcombe. A police officer, he was selected as the experimental “Super Cop” by the Metropolitan Police Force. He has no powers but is extremely fit and athletic, and trained in hand to hand combat. He wears a suit made of a fine chain mail (hence the code name Chain) which is bullet proof, water proof, heat proof, cold proof and more. He discovered, when he began working for the programme, that several of his friends had genetic variant powers, and they banded together to become the Chain Gang. In later years, Gary would move from field work to counter terrorism intelligence. He appears in From a Jack to a King and Killing Me Softly.