“These paintings with their obsessional use of stacked colours keep freshness and spontaniety, concentrated preoccupation with colour and colour relationships is what they are about. Necessity such as this grants staying power to pictures and these pictures don’t only look good on first acquaintance they stay good.”

“They are tremulously alive with a special radiance which is characteristic of the best in modern painting.
At the frontier of painting as we know it just nudging ahead into the unknown as the artist begins to luxuriate in his own colour, Pollock’s colour, imperious I’d call it.”

“With great dedication Pollock, through his essential painterly practice, successfully manages to attained to both the sensual and the artistic qualities of his specific medium of expression.

On the heavily worked surface of his pictures the intuitive action of seeing and the conceptual process of painting meet and interconnect in the most direct and free encounter.

It is only through years of intense observation and painterly experimentation that Pollock has managed to “ go backward from the thing signified to the sign.

In these richly sensuous paintings of Pollock, not only is colour revealed to us as the most fundamental feature of our visual world, but the very experience of seeing is re-constructed for us, not in light as in nature, but through the highly articulated artifice of colour placement and arrangement”

“Pollock creates cohesion out of apparent chaos. Each colour is made to fight for its own sovereign space.

Red jostles green, purple nudges yellow, blue elbows orange and the paint seems alive, bubbling rising, sometimes in crested waves.

The effect is overwhelming, operatic in its splendour, magical in its impact.”

“I have admired Fred Pollock’s paintings since I was a student in the 1970s. His work never fails to satisfy. His journey with abstraction is epic.”

“The intelligent sensuality of Fred Pollock’s paintings is a joy”

“Pollock’s paintings are strictly non-referential. If the viewer finds associations with the visible world within them, that is his privilege, but if the artist finds an association he will obliterate it at once.

The format is not preconceived. A canvas will begin it’s life on the floor, then it will be stapled to the wall, maybe vertically, maybe horizontally. and it will gradually grow to maturity.

Sometimes a painting will be put away as unresolved, then brought out again months later, seen with a fresh eye, more colours added, some shifts made, and then, and only then, if the artist is satisfied, it will be stretched.”

“The painings Fred Pollock has made since the 1980s are characterized by strong, clear colour. Primaries, secondaries and tertiaries are decisively and inventively organised, in dynamic and vibrant relation to each other. The handling is direct, un-virtuosic, almost disarmingly straight-forward.

At first glance they appear as fragmented colour-wheels thrown into kaleido-scopic, turbulent motion. A longer look reveals a firmly fixed pictorial architecture, with complex activity underpinned by positional certainty. As their underlying strength becomes more apparent, their colour deepens and broadens. Unexpected subtleties are revealed in the wake of a dramatic initial impact.

These paintings almost inevitability contain hints of nature, of the light and space of the visible world. Yet compared to his peers Alan Gouk or John Hoyland, Pollock’s vision is more resolutely self-contained, more obsessively concerned with the creation of expressive, powerful and affecting abstract images. I have often thought they would be beautiful things to live with, their complexities changing over time and in different lights, a constant yet ever-developing Here and Now.”