Relationship between avant-garde art and American pop culture brush strokes and in techniques partially dictated by chance, such as dripping or spilling the paint directly onto the canvas. Examples of this include Jackson Pollock dripping commercial paints on raw canvas to build up complex and tangled skeins of paint into exciting and suggestive linear patterns and Willem de Kooning used extremely vigorous and expressive brush strokes to build up richly colored and textured images. The second category of Abstract Expressionism is represented by a variety of styles ranging from Color field, to Lyrical abstraction; delicate imagery and fluid shapes and fields of color included in works by Clyfford
Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle (or "Eryngium") is an oil painting on parchment pasted on canvas by German artist Albrecht Dürer. Painted in 1493, it is the earliest of Dürer's painted self-portraits and has been identified as one of the first self-portraits painted by a Northern artist. It was acquired in 1922 by the Louvre in Paris. Dürer looks out at the viewer with a psychologically complex but rather melancholy and reserved, serious minded, facial expression. During the 15th century, thistles were symbols of male conjugal fidelity. In 1493, Dürer was