who the #$&% is jackson pollock?

i just finished watching what might become my all-time favorite movie of 2007...a little film about a long-haul truck driver woman named teri horton, narrated by 60 minutes' don hewitt, chronicling the challenge of this 73 year old's attempts to prove a painting she picked up fom a local thrift shop for $5 is truly a creation of jackson pollock.

for starters it is a sweetly compiled story paralleling commentaries from art connoiseurs, forensic scientists, art forgers, fraudulent art dealers, lawyers, gallery owners and the local friends and family of teri. i found myself easily smiling at the shameless and overt contrasts developed between a non-academic taking on the convoluted politics of the highly mysterious art connoisseurship. (teri says: 'everybody knows that a fairytale starts out "once upon a time," but a truck driver's tale starts out "you ain't gonna belive this shit") a woman who didn't know the difference between jackson pollock and michael jackson is told this ugly painting stacked amid piles of other less interesting treasures at her garage sale might be worth millions and now she is determined to prove its authorship...though being offered first, two million, and later, nine-million dollars for her un-authenticated painting, she turns down both offers demanding that a true pollock is worth more!


perhaps i resonate most with this charming film because i too wonder at the politics that drive our culture. how is it that a high brow suite-clad art connoisseur can definitively claim that because the painting does not 'sing' of pollock to him that he refuses to believe finger-print matches and paint samples would ever hold a candle to his credentialed eye? (at one point a this top notch art connosseiur responds to the fingerrpint matches by saying: 'scientists are very interesing, but they come after the true connoisuers. so fingerprints, all this stuff, kinda come after. that lovely "what-if." its not essential to the heart, and the artistic soul of that thing) and yet so contractictory to my inclination -- i would most often sway toward the side of intuition before institution, yet in this case i am rooting for the 'cold-hard facts' of course, these cold-hard facts are being sought after by an eccentric trucker woman who believes in the depth of her being that this is a pollock for no other reason than because she simply knows it to be true. pollock, a name she had never known before this discovery. i suppose there is some intuition in that.

of course, i was fascinated by the measures these indivduals took to discover the authenticity of the painting...soon lori had enlisted the help of her car-salesman son and then the assistance of an art dealer, who had recently been released from prison for fraud, in addition to a gentle forensic scientist who specialized in fingprint analysis.

i was mostly disappointed that there was no mention of fractal analysis -- which is why i picked up the movie to begin with -- and then i discovered this article which sadly seems to unravel the great tidbit of knowledge i most loved about dear sweet j.p.

so fractal anaylsis might have no bearing on pollock's work, nonetheless there is something undeniably rivetting about his creations and even a sweet old truck driver from california found herself beguiled. the story ends with her country-western guitarist son playing a song her wrote about his mother's adventures in the art world singing 'i know she's finally found it //been on a ten year rush // to find a home for the painting // whose canvas never felt a brush.' if anything, the journey of teri horton infused a community with a passion and a knowledge of a brilliant man whose name may have never been known to them before her fortuitous discovery.

i hope i might live with even a fraction of such passion for life and such conviction of where my calling has lead me.