Reporter from Life magazine: How do you know when you re finished with a painting? Jackson Pollock: How do you know when you re finished making love? Pollock was a great painter. He was also miserable and made everyone around him miserable a lot of the time. He was an alcoholic and manic-depressive, and he died in a drunken car crash that killed an innocent woman. What Ed Harris, in an Oscar-nominated turn, is able to show in Pollock is that when Pollock was painting, he got a reprieve. He was also reasonably happy during those periods when he stopped drinking. Then the black cloud would descend again.