Veins of Porcelain: Leviathan Beneath the Skin

Veins of Porcelain: Leviathan Beneath the Skin transforms Jackson Pollock’s  Blue (Moby Dick) into a turbulent maritime fever dream where subconscious rage, mythic obsession, and the abyss of identity coil together in layered surrealism. This conceptual reinterpretation pulls Pollock’s latent symbolism into a roaring sea of fragmented narrative—where the ghost of Melville’s white whale merges with Pollock’s own dripping syntax to form a sprawling meditation on control, surrender, and the monstrous unknowable. 

In the composition, a colossal white whale glides in spectral silence through the upper ocean layers, its enormous mass at once gentle and foreboding. Below, waves crash into a fractured tapestry of blues, yellows, and blood oranges—colors that do not mix but slice through each other like fractured emotions. Beneath the swirling sea, faces emerge: a human visage barely contained within the roiling abstract seafoam, Pollock’s layered gestural echoes outlining an eye wide with awe or madness. Fish, sailors, and masks flicker between strokes, vanishing as soon as they appear, while a lone figure on a vermilion fish-shaped vessel casts a net into the psychological current—more oracle than fisherman. 

Pollock’s visual language—the looping lines, violent splatters, and feral instinct—flicker through the deep indigo undercurrents of the painting. His signature rhythmic chaos now floats among marine symbols and dream forms. Where once the canvas offered primordial gestures, here they function as wave and whirlpool, storm surge and sonar. His violence has softened slightly—not erased, but transformed into mythic tide. 

The color palette orchestrates the emotional range. Blue, in every hue from pale arctic to blackest navy, becomes the breath and death of the sea. It is not a background; it is character, pressure, memory. Cobalt lashes across the canvas like snapped rigging; cerulean mists blur the horizon of thought. Yellows are less light than signal—distress flares, false suns, fevered hallucinations. Red enters sparingly but violently: in the fish the man rides, in fractured strokes that may be blood or rage or divine punctuation. White is both whale and void, a sacred absence that moves with colossal silence, refusing interpretation but demanding reverence. 

As I built this reinterpretation, my artistic intention was to summon the emotional mythology that Pollock embedded in the original  Blue (Moby Dick) without naming it. I sought to make visible the internal chase—the one not for whale, but for self. Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit, mirrored by Pollock’s own battle with control, masculinity, and abstraction, became the undercurrent for my process. The sea was no longer water, but subconscious. The whale, no longer animal, but consequence. 

There’s an intimacy to the way Pollock’s strokes intermingle with the myth. You can almost hear the creak of old ships and the scream of the unseen beneath his splatters. I chose to embed the face at the heart of the canvas not as anchor but as vessel—something flooded, carved, reassembled. The person is the sea. The myth is within the skin. 

Above the ocean, the sky offers no comfort. It’s awash in scatterings of soft coral lights—like stars drowning in their own radiance. A distant ship trembles on the horizon, cut in half by a diagonal fold of storm and silence. That boundary, between surface and depth, reality and myth, marks the place where Pollock’s abstraction ends and dream begins. 

The tiny fisherman seated on his surreal vermilion fish is not hunting. He is listening. His line is not cast for conquest but for communion. His presence, near the bottom right, becomes a quiet contradiction to the rest of the chaotic drama. Perhaps he is Pollock himself, or Melville, or even the viewer—watching the myth unfold, wondering what in themselves is sea, and what is beast. 

Veins of Porcelain: Leviathan Beneath the Skin thus becomes an elegy to obsession, myth, and unspoken depths. A tale not of whales, but of wounds. A ritual of color where the ocean thinks in Pollock’s syntax and memory becomes current. This is not just a reimagination—it is a drift into the deep.