The first thing you'll notice about

She-Wolf is, well, it's a wolf. But this wolf is really a template for
a study of painting materials, for what painting can do. It is a wolf, in other
words, but
that's not really that important actually. Symbolic references coming out of Jung
and
Freud again. But, rather, let's think about
how this paint is handled. Now, one of the things that you may
have your eye caught to initially is this very fine paint splatter here. Now, this
is an easel painting,
meaning that it was painted on the easel, not on the floor. And it's painted with
artist quality
paints from the tube with brushes. In other words,
conventional stuff for the most part. However, this splatter of paint is
the kind of thing that you'd get from flicking your wet paintbrush
directly at the painting. In other words, not dripping on the floor,
but splashing, spraying paint. This is a technique that David Alfaro
Siqueiros, among other people, used. And Pollock, who studied with
Siqueiros in New York City, certainly threw paint around, so to speak. And here we
have a very,
very early source in Pollock's work, 1943 again, of the drip. Not the splash so
much, but there are certainly some free drips going
on in the background of this painting. These are really, really low in
the painting chronologically. In other words, it's one of the first
marks that were made on the canvas. Now, very broadly, starting to
work in with the wolf here, and you can see all of his very,
very fine splatter all over the painting. Now, very interestingly, if you start
looking at this background, so to speak, of the painting,
which is this kind of muted gray, blue color,
this is not really the background at all. And if you start to look at areas
like this on the right edge, you start to see that that blue is
actually brought over the paint, obscuring all that splatter
underneath on the painting. Now, if we go up to the top, we begin to
see that actually there's a little bit of spray going on, some loose drips of that
so-called background color, as well. And there's also some kind of
finger painting going on in here, a sculptor's idea in paint. In other words,
the paint's already there, and then manipulating it strictly for texture. So,
already, Pollock really interested
in the texture of the painting. And while we're on that subject,
we'll look down here at the lower left. And we'll realize that as
we really zoom in here, that Pollock has actually
added sand into his paint. Not for color, in fact, you don't
see the color of the sand at all. Rather you have this very gritty,
well, guess what, sandpaper type texture because there's
literally sand mixed into the paint. Feel free to try that yourself. Strictly a
textural change
that Pollock's working with. But going back to this gray, blue color. Very
interesting that Pollock has
brought this background, so to speak, over the figure, which is to say
the wolf and all of this splatter. And this idea derived from Franz Kline,
among other painters, who work with a black figure on ground,
but then work with white paint, bringing the ground back over
the figure and refining it. Kind of a give and go about figure and ground, an idea
that
really has its source in Franz Kline. Pollock picks it up,
de Kooning did a whole lot of this. It's one of those ideas that were
in the air, so to speak. So, finally, just to recap She-Wolf,
certainly a whole lot of psychology going on here, a whole lot of expressionism
going on, and gestural kind of painting. Things that make you think of de
Kooning in terms of these very loud, very fast brush strokes,
aggressive colors. But then the early source of the drip.
She-Wolf, 1943.