Jasper Johns – A Classic Contemporary Painter

 Jasper Johns emerged as a talented contemporary artist who liked to work with an innovative form of printmaking and especially painting. This great painter cum printmaker was born in Georgia.  Hi spent his early stage of childhood in South Carolina, Allendale with grandparents after the marriage of his parents failed. He lived almost a year with his mother in South Carolina, and several years with aunt, Gladys in the same city.

 He graduated from a school from Sumter where he used to live with his mother again.  In a biography, he mentioned that, there was nothing about the art or artist in his childhood’s place, and he didn’t even know about anything related with art. He just knew that, it would be a situation which would be completely different from things he was living with. He started drawing at the age of just three, and continued the journey of turning himself as a legendry painter. (Similar masterpieces can also be found in New York by Thomas Kinkade).

Johns completed his university studies in 1948 from South Carolina. Then, he went to New York City, and got into another art school “The Parsons School of Design” in 1949. From 1952-1953, Johns stayed for a year during the famous “Korean War”. Johns is still recognized for his special Flag painting which he did in between 1954 to 1955. The masterpiece was made after having a dream related with the country’s flag. He was also known with a nick called “Neo Dadaist” as he didn’t follow the traditional pop art. Johns although used subjective matters where objects and images were included in his master art. However, there are still speculations about the compilations about the pop art where Jasper was named as the classic exam of Iconography. During his early period of painting, Jasper used some common schemes like maps, flags, letters, targets, and numerical icons.  The painter is also famous due to his incorporations of media like plaster relief and encaustic in some of the paintings. Johns always played with the paradoxes, contradictions, opposites, and some classic ironies of life.

 Some says, it was like Marcel Duchamp (he was also been part of Dada Movement).  Johns then produced sculptures, intaglio, and lithographs with those motifs. John’s limelight approach was to add popular iconographic objects into painting. It helped his vision over particular matters or his associations over those incidences. Some of the abstract expressionists still don’t believe in such concept but many of them did realize that, he changed the scenario of using subjects towards the abstract painting.

If you like to watch a small biography of Jasper Johns, then look out here in this video.