Today on our walk through art history, you will be swiftly met by action painting. This is the style of painting that so many of us often think of when we hear the words: abstract art. The image of a slap of paint unconsciously thrown across a canvas comes to mind. Think Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline.

It was during the 40's and 50's that this style of art first came into it's own. It was the jazzy, hip New York School of painters that first started owning action painting and working exclusively in this aesthetic. The process of putting the paint on canvas could have been seen as performance art itself, and this unconscious action was really what the heart of the movement was all about. The artists smeared, dribbled, threw and splashed paint onto their canvases, Pollock famously hid things like cigarette butts in his.