Jackson Pollock Studio Floor Poster

This poster reproduces a photograph of the floor of Jackson Pollock’s studio at Springs, on the eastern end of Long Island, where he and his wife, the painter Lee Krasner, lived and worked. The boards are saturated with the drips, pours and spatters left behind by the paintings made on top of them.

In late 1945 the couple bought a wood-frame house and barn at 830 Springs Fireplace Road, with a down-payment lent by the collector Peggy Guggenheim. Pollock converted the barn into a studio, laid raw unstretched canvas directly on the floor, and worked from above — pouring and flicking liquid enamel house paint, moving around all four sides so that he was, in his own words, literally in the painting. Between roughly 1947 and 1950 this method produced the works that defined Abstract Expressionism and made him the most famous American painter of his generation. Time magazine gave him the nickname “Jack the Dripper.”

The nickname undersells the control. Spend time with the canvases and the looping skeins resolve into something deliberate rather than chaotic, a balance Pollock could repeat at will. The studio floor itself records that process directly: it survives today, preserved as he left it, carrying the ghost traces of Autumn Rhythm, Blue Poles and many other paintings. The work was made on it, and a good part of the work is still on it.

Our poster imagines a 1988 gallery exhibition built around that floor as an artefact in its own right. The clean layout lets the texture of the boards take the whole frame, with quiet typography that keeps the focus on the surface where the paintings began.

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