A Day of Art and Wine

Today my friend and I visited the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center, which was the home of Jackson Pollock and his wife Lee Krasner. We got to see the studio in which Pollock made many of his greatest pieces - the floor is spattered with paint and looks like a painting itself. The walls are also splattered with paint from Krasner's works. She was also an artist and started working in the studio after Pollock's death in 1956. She didn't paint on the floor like Pollock did, so the walls still show remnants of her works while the floor shows paint from Pollock's works. The walls of the studio had panels narrating Pollock's life, as well as many photos of him and Krasner in the studio. It was surreal just standing in the studio. We had to put on special foam slippers to walk inside...but we were actually walking on paint from works of art that are in the Met, the MoMA, and the Guggenheim!

The backyard and Accabonac Creek behind the house

The tourguide (who was actually a Vassar grad) mentioned that almost all of the outdoor scenes of the movie Pollock, the movie of Jackson Pollock's life released in 2000, were filmed on the grounds. After touring the house and studio, I'm really interested in seeing the movie.

The back door of the house

Pollock liked to collect boulders on his property, and gathered them in the center of the backyard

The studio (unfortunately, no photos inside!)

The only painting by Pollock in the house or study center (there were other sketches and drawings made by him on display)

In the evening, we decided to go to a vineyard nearby that has live jazz and wine, cheese, and crackers on Thursday nights. It was a Tuscan-style estate, and even in the cloudy, drizzly weather it was beautiful.



I'd love to go back and tour the vineyard on a sunny day!

Tomorrow we're planning to go to the cemetery nearby where Pollock and Krasner are both buried, which has actually become known as the artists' and writers' cemetery. (Although Pollock, Krasner, and the wife of Willem de Kooning are the only names I recognized.) Here's the wikepedia page, which shows the gravestones of Pollock and Krasner, both boulders from their land.