Jackson Pollock Read Online Free

effort to emulate his oldest brother, resisting the creative possibilities
     that lay within his grasp. A photograph dating from the time he was six years old
     shows him to be a pretty youth with fine blond hair, a dimpled chin, and a shy, sweet
     smile that hints at his sensitive disposition. His brother Sande, the closest to him
     in age, once described him as “the sweetest guy, the most unselfish boy. I never saw
     Jack cruel to any animal—dog, cat anything. He was gentle to an unnatural degree.”
     Sande, a dark, small, self-sacrificing boy, instinctively felt protective toward his
     baby brother, as though recognizing a certain helplessness in Jackson that left him
     unequipped for the rigors of farm life. On most afternoons, while his brothers tended
     to their farm chores, Jackson, who had no chores, would simply wander around the barnyard
     with Gyp, the family dog, a white mongrel with a patch of black around oneeye. In his naïveté Jackson often got in trouble for allowing Gyp to drink from the
     buckets of fresh milk in the yard. His brothers all agreed that Jackson took after
     their father, for LeRoy too was fond of animals. He couldn’t stand killing them, not
     even a chicken. It was Stella who slaughtered the poultry on the farm.
    Four years after moving to Phoenix, Stella became disenchanted with the city. Farmers
     from the South were arriving in large numbers, planting fields once reserved for corn
     and alfalfa with long-staple cotton and replacing family-owned dairy farms with large
     operations staffed by itinerant farm hands. To Stella cotton farming was “low-down
     drudgery,” and she wanted no part of it. She complained to her husband that Phoenix
     was becoming a cotton town, and a cotton town was no place to raise a family; she
     wanted to move. LeRoy, however, was unsympathetic, pointing out to his wife that they
     had managed to build up a first-rate stock of dairy cows, chickens, and hogs and that
     their farm represented a foothold into the future.
    But Stella became obsessed with the idea of moving. One day she returned from town
     with a stack of postcards and a map of the western United States. She wrote to the
     chambers of commerce in most of the cities on the map and was answered with dozens
     of brochures. Night after night she read the brochures aloud to LeRoy, reeling off
     facts about distant cities, each with its promises of ideal climate and perfect location
     and opportunities for success. Though LeRoy still felt they had nothing to gain by
     leaving Phoenix, he grew tired of arguing with his wife, who, in her eagerness to
     leave Phoenix, could not be reasoned with. Besides, Stella had already made up her
     mind: she wanted to move to Chico, California. Though she had never visited the town,
     she had read in a brochure that Chico had tree-lined avenues and the largest oak in
     the world. She had read that Chico was the “Rose City of Butte County” and that Butte
     County was the largest olive-growing center in the state. What impressed Stella the
     most about Chico were its schools, which included a state college. She told her husband
     that Chico was a place where their sons could receive a good education.
    In January 1918, against his better judgment, LeRoy auctionedoff his animals and sold his Phoenix farm. One month later he purchased an eighteen-acre
     fruit farm in Chico, California, a town he immediately disliked. The family’s large
     white house was their first with running water and electric lights, but such modern
     conveniences were no consolation to LeRoy. He resented having to work as a citrus
     farmer but had no choice, for Chico was a citrus town in which all human effort was
     spent growing fruit, entering statewide agricultural contests, and staging pruning
     demonstrations; the town of nine thousand desperately wanted to become the citrus
     capital of the Sacramento Valley. When the Pollocks first settled in Chico, LeRoy
     went to farm bureau