Fred Pollock was born in Glasgow in 1937, and studied at Glasgow School of Art 1955-59. He lives and works in London, and was one of the artists who showed at Stockwell Depot in the Seventies.
His work was included in “British Painting 1952-77” at the Royal Academy in 1977, and in the Eighties he began a series of solo shows at the Vanessa Devereux Gallery, London. In 1980 he was in the Hayward Annual curated by John Hoyland, and in 1982 the Serpentine Gallery Summer Show.
In 1984 Pollock was invited by Anthony Caro as guest artist at the Triangle Workshop in Mashomack, New York State. In the Nineties he had solo shows at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery, London, as well as solo shows in Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Groningen.
His work has always been held in high regard by critics and collectors, and Pollock is now considered pre-eminent amongst abstract painters of his generation for his sustained exploration of abstraction through highly charged colour values. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Arts Council and the Scottish Arts Council.
“My aim was to make paintings which were visually powerful, which had a lot of impact on first viewing, but also had a depth of other events.
You certainly had to have impact..to be satisfied… and other smaller details round about the bigger details which gave it a lasting effect.
Starting from scratch it was a case of making marks on the canvas with no preconceived ideas to begin with, and just gradually by building up the paint a series of colours and marks you would eventually cover the canvas. Then you would notice that things were beginning to happen in various areas of the canvas.”
“It was a case of getting these various events to pull together to create one entity. The colour had to be the main thing in the painting, the colour relationships, how colours related to each other.
There’s an endless variety of colours, so you are always finding something that’s new in painting, you’re searching for something that’s new and something that’s truthful to yourself mainly.
Every day is completely different and I never really know what I’ve been up to until I go in to the studio first thing in the morning and I see what I’ve been up to the day or week before.
I bring out a few paintings and have a look at them and there’s always one that seems to need my immediate attention. The satisfying part is seeing that and then doing something about it and it’s the doing that’s the really interesting part of painting.
It’s a continual daily search, you’re searching for something that really hasn’t been seen before in a “new discovery kind of way.”