Even so there was still a divide between the abstract expressionists. The first grouping is the Action Painters who attacked their canvases with expressive brush strokes. These Action Painters are the likes of Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning who tapped into their spontaneous improvisation skills and used large brushes to create sweeping gestural marks upon their canvas. Pollock famously using chance techniques to directly place his inner impulse onto the canvas.

 

The second group of artists included the likes of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman and they were deeply interested in Religion and mythology and thus created simple compositional pieces, usually large areas of single block colour that had the intentions of inspiring contemplative responses in the viewer. Newman famously said “Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life’, we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.” Hiis approach to painting developed from the 1960’s into what is now know as Colour Field Painting, characterised by the artists rhetoric of using a large surface area of mostly a single flat colour.