This photograph of Jasper Johns was found on the website Jasper-Johns-org.
At the start of this term, I researched the artist Jasper Johns, because I was interested in his encaustic work. Johns was an American painter, sculptor and printmaker who was born in 1930 in Georgia and raised in South Carolina. When he was 19 he moved to New York City and enrolled in Commercial Art School. By his mid-twenties, he was already famous for his paintings of targets, numerals and American flags and had his work exhibited in museums and galleries in New York. Johns frequently appropriated well-known images turning them into cultural icons. He is known for constantly recycling and combining images in extensive series.
Jasper Johns, White Flag, 1955 (Image from the Met Museum).
White Flag is the largest of his flag paintings and the first in which the flag is presented in monochrome. By draining most of the colour away from the flag Johns shifts our attention away from the familiar image and invites us to consider it in a new way. White Flag is painted on three separate panels: the stars, the seven upper strips and the longer stripes below. Using three canvases messes with our idea of what makes a painting and is an unusual idea. He worked on each panel separately.
After applying a ground of unbleached beeswax, he built up the stars, each one of them is separately cut out and collaged onto the surface. The negative areas around them and the strips with applications of collage - cut or torn pieces of newsprint, other papers and bits of fabric. He dipped these in molten wax and stuck them to the surface. He then joined the three panels and overpainted them with more beeswax mixed with pigments, adding touches of white oil. The fast setting medium of encaustic enabled Johns to make each brushstroke distinct, while the forty-eight-star flag design underneath provided a structure for the richly varied surface - which ranges from translucent to opaque.
Close up of the stars - showing the artists brushstrokes in the wax.
Everything about this piece seems to be hidden/veiled. The work has been described as reticent, even chilly. It teases the viewer to look closer and try to see what lies beneath the layers of wax. The painting is almost like a sculpture with a relief surface. The work is inscrutable, fascinating - it reminds us we don't have to understand everything we come into contact with. Sometimes a mystery is appealing, at other times infuriating.
'Surrender'
Johns work shocks, surprises and confuses the audience and is, therefore, thought-provoking. He uses appropriation, taking something familiar and presenting it in a new context. He challenges the viewers' preconceptions about what art is, what does a white flag represent, what does the American flag mean, even 'what is sacred?'
Military Funeral
His work is relevant to my own because of his skill with the medium but also because of his unusual approach to its use. Combining canvasses to make one big canvas is a great idea, it emphasizes the different sections of the flag. His use of an appropriated base (and all of the viewers preconceived ideas about that image) is clever, thought-provoking. His techniques and skill with layering and collaging, building up the work and building history into its layers. The way he encapsulates and preserving the flag in wax. It is almost a ghostly shroud, like the dead soldiers whose coffins are covered in the flag at their funerals. It's all very inspiring and helps me 'think outside the box' with the medium and my own work.
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