Project 1 Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns Film Review

                                                            Ideas in paint

        Jasper Johns is a contemporary artist from Augusta, Georgia.  He primarily works with paint and takes simple yet meaningful objects turning them into works of art.  In some cases he would also make sculptures that were not too spectacular in my opinion.  One of his best-known works of art that brought him publicity was the “Flag”.  Personally I think he chose this subject because he just came back from the Koran War and he wanted to show his patriotism.  Personally I think Jasper overused the American Flag.  This is because he kept using the flag as the subject of his painting and would just alter its color or scheme.  Out of all his flag pieces, I liked Three Flags the best.  In this case he painted the American flag and added 2 smaller flags on top making the art literally stand out.  
       Another subject that Jasper used multiple times was a simple target.  He would paint a target and add different features to each work.  Such as using different colors and in one of his popular works he added a wood background with sculpted human features on the top.  To give the target a dull look Jasper used many layers of darker paint and let it dry.  Then              he would paint over the dark paint with bright colors adding a aged affect to the piece.

        Jasper Johns also used other simple objects such as numbers, tools, and maps as subjects for his artwork.  To make these simple objects stand out Jasper would add a lot of vibrant colors on top of layers of paint.  He would also take simple numbers and turn them into a very different style of art.  I didn’t like the fact that he chose to use one number so much for his paintings.  However, in his work 0 Through 9 he took all these numbers and layered them over each other to give a very unique original looking piece of art.

  Jaspers art seems very simplistic when compared to other artists, but he managed to create many mainstream works of art.  I still don’t fully understand his specific choice in style of art, but there is definitely something about his works that catch’s the eyes of the public.  You would think that adding and adding would create a clustered look, but Jasper managed to do this with many of his pieces.  Like he said, "Do Something, do something to that, and then do something to that." So his intention was to keep adding and adding until he had his work of art.  A very weird sounding method, but Jasper Johns knows what he's talking about.