Inspire Me Thursday- Action Painting

This week's Inspire Me Thursday prompt was a tough one!  I spent time reading about Action Painting  on Wikipedia, I looked at work by Jackson Pollock, and for some reason got stuck on the idea of dribbling paint and being abstract.  And I created two Works of Something (rather than Works in Progress!) that I didn't like at all.  Part of the problem for me is that I spend a lot of time painting with one year olds.  They are the "stars" of spontaneously created art in my opinion.  Which of course, lead to a lot of thoughts about what is called art, how art is created, how we value art....  For now, the thought that sticks with me is how important it is for children to take the sense of themselves as creative beings into adulthood with them.  It really reinforces the idea of process not product for me.  And that's when this prompt clicked for me.  I started thinking about what spontaneous process I enjoy, that I actually do all the time.                                                                                                                                        

And that would be dumping an assortment of colors on a surface and smearing them around with my fingers.  As usual, it was a lot of fun.  I did have to resist the temptation of scratching images into the paint layers, because I was trying to keep it image-less. 

Still, I looked at this and thought-this isn't done. 

So I gave in and went to my scrap drawer and pulled out a couple sheets of old magazine text.  When I pick out text, I usually go with whatever text I read that first attracts my attention.  I cut the text and a page number out and glued them on.  It still didn't look done.  So I started looking through my photos until I found one that seemed to work with the text I'd chose.  I printed it out and transfered on top of my paint.  Then I scanned it in to the computer, played with filters until it looked right to me.   And ended up with this:

What was interesting to me is that this process was spontaneous for me.  I  didn't plan out what text I was going to use or what photo I wanted to use.  I just kept adding layers until I had something that said something to me.   It was all process for me as I worked, with very little thought to what the product was going to look like when it was done.   

When I went back and looked at the quotes by Jackson Pollock on the Inspire Me Thursday site,  I decided maybe I didn't stray too far from the theme. 

"Painting is self discovery."  Jackson Pollock