Title		Pollock's Patterns of the Buffalo Herd
Artist		Irving Middle School, Norman, Art Class
Sponsor		Chesapeake Energy Corporation
Location		In front of Bricktown Ball Park, corner of Mickey Mantel & Reno, downtown Oklahoma City

Artist's Description

If you can just let kids paint with creativity and you can call it art, it's a good day. Into this art project we portray the spirit of Jackson Pollock, his energy and his detail. The interwoven patterns of his work have a magnetic power. The buffalo that stands alone on a hill is magnificent yet the market path along the earth that a heard of buffalo displays is as powerful as any Jackson Pollock's painting. In American's past, herds of buffalo crafted patterns which spanned as far as the eye could see. Jackson Pollock was from Wyoming and compared his work to the mid western sky which he viewed as never ending. For this reason, he didn't confine his painting by framing them, which is another way he connected the never-ending nature of his style to the mid western sky. He felt that as the artist paints he travels into his work, evidenced by his

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style of walking around his painting, working from its four sides, and literally being in the painting. Not only was Pollock in his paintings, but the view of Jackson Pollock's art is drawn into them as well. Using Pollock's style, the three dimensional nature of the buffalo lends itself to an unframed painting. The students at Irving Middle School, under the direction of Dan Harris, studied the work of Jackson Pollock and used his style to paint the buffalo. They dripped paint onto the buffalo forming sweeping, rhythmic patterns of line that weave as a herd of buffalo weave across a meadow and that flow endlessly as the Midwestern sky.