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LeRoy found work in Riverside, California. During the summer of 1927 and the three years which followed, Jackson and his brother, Sanford, also worked there with their father, doing topographical surveys of the Grand Canyon. Later Jackson would note the vast landscape of the West influenced his artistic vision. When he finally obtained his own property, one of the first changes he made was to move a barn so he could see more of the distant horizon. His sense of the ‘all over’ quality of a view was evolving.

Although he was only fifteen, Pollock began working with men for whom drinking alcohol was a daily routine. His experience with excessive drinking began at that time. Addiction to alcohol would last the rest of his short life, with only a few sober periods. Even at very inappropriate times and places, Pollock would act out the rugged and often anti-social brawling he learned in his early days with the older cowboys, while working with his father and the Grand Canyon crew. Pollock would always remain, as Guggenheim biographer Mary V. Dearborn expressed it, “…a raw, uncouth, barely socialised child of the hardscrabble American West, yet possessed of an explosive talent.”[27] As Guggenheim remembered, Pollock “became one might say devilish”, on social occasions (42).

Bird, 1938–1941. Oil and sand on canvas, 70.5 × 61.6 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Number 13A, 1948, (also called Arabesque), 1948. Oil and enamel on canvas, 94.6 × 295.9 cm, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

Untitled (Naked Man), c.1938–1941. Oil on plywood, 217 × 60.9 cm, Private Collection.

Later in letters to his sons, LeRoy expressed regret he had not been a more positive influence on his five sons. On the negative side, his alcoholism influenced the boys, Jackson in particular. While drinking with the older men during these years, Jackson displayed early symptoms of his alcoholism.

In 1930, Pollock wrote to his brother Charles, describing youth as “this so-called happy part of one’s life,” stating it was to him “a bit of damnable hell.”[28]

In 1927, Edward Hopper (1882–1967) showed Manhattan Bridge. Sound began to be added to commercial movies.