Part Two

Benton and the Pollock Boys

Years before I commenced the practice of referring to actual objects for the subject matter of my pictures, I would get fascinated with the nature of a fence post, a bush, a rock, or a ripple of water, and I would pass from an abstracted study of one of these into a long and, as far as I could ever explain it, an empty reverie. This psychological failing developed long before I ever thought of myself as an artist.

—Thomas Hart Benton