Veins of Porcelain: The Mirror Has Veins

Veins of Porcelain: The Mirror Has Veins reinterprets Jackson Pollock’s  Number 12 as a visual memento mori—a reflection on the layered decay beneath constructed beauty, where desire and mortality brush against each other with uncanny intimacy. The original chaotic tangle of Pollock’s drip technique is not stripped away here, but instead pressed into the surface of bone and skin, like veins surfacing beneath alabaster. What once existed purely in abstraction now becomes a portrait of vanity’s silent haunting.  

The primary figure, a poised woman caught mid-gaze, holds a cigarette with ritual precision. She is elegance personified—composed, seductively unreadable. But hovering at her cheek, overlapping her composure, is a skeletal form forged from Pollock’s explosive chaos. The skull, rendered not with anatomical realism but with gestural abstraction, is a collision of vitality and entropy. The woman appears not frightened, but fused—her face turning into the skull’s own, as if the act of looking has peeled back her surface and exposed time’s quiet violence.  

Below this dual portrait, a second figure cradles an ornate mirror. Yet within the mirror’s frame lies not reflection, but revelation: a miniature storm of Pollock’s brushless energy. Here, the mirror refuses to show what is—it reveals what festers underneath. The painting is a confrontation with self-perception. Beauty, power, allure—they are all filtered illusions. Behind the makeup, behind the fashion, there is drip, burn, fracture.  

The colors unfold as layered metaphors. Vermillion and rust erupt from Pollock’s skeletal tangle, mimicking dried blood, decay, and time itself corroding memory. The yellows and ochres glisten faintly, suggesting former vibrancy now faded—sunlight turned to stain. Streaks of white spatter against the sepia-tinted photograph, like fading breath or ash. And beneath the layers, shades of deep crimson and black offer tension between passion and despair. The woman’s monochrome face, cast in high-contrast grayscale, pushes forward the notion of glamour as fossil—a sculpture of the self left to erode.  

As the artist reimagining this piece, I was drawn to the way Pollock’s  Number 12 does not follow the eye—it overwhelms it. I wondered what might happen if that very chaos of line and motion was used not as a field of action, but as a forensic tool. What might it uncover if applied not to canvas, but to the human form? The skull emerged first—not as a symbol of death alone, but of what we ignore in life: the fact that all performance ends. The mirror, then, became necessary. A surface that doesn’t just reflect but condemns. I asked myself if beauty can still be beautiful when it’s honest. If decay can be painted with grace.  

Pollock’s dripping becomes emotional musculature here. It stretches over the face like history, like the past we pretend we’re not still wearing. The fashion photograph is not ironic. It is crucial. Because it’s in the image of control, poise, and desirability that the deepest cracks form. We are meant to admire her. But we are also meant to see through her.  

The juxtaposition of mirror, skull, and glamour blurs temporal boundaries. Is she looking into the future? Is the skull her fate—or already her truth? The mirror offers no clear answer. Only an echo of painted screams and turbulent lines—Pollock’s original language of unrest. The frame is ornate, suggesting vanity, but inside it, we see only deterioration.  

This composition is about the moment the mask slips, not by accident, but by invitation. The chaos of  Number 12 reveals itself not as noise, but as the structure of everything we try to bury: fear of aging, desire to be seen, the quiet horror of being known. The woman, skull, and mirror are not three separate figures—they are one being split by perception.