In this paper we will be analyzing John Jaspers painting, Flags and going over how it creates a visual impact to the viewer through the use of an optical illusion on the viewer of the painting. The subject of this work is the American Flag, but it is painted in a not so conventional way at a glance, but once you look at it for a while you will see it in a normal light.
Jasper used this piece to help show that the viewer was the “painter” in this artwork. He does this by using an optical illusion of the American Flag. It 's painted in non traditional colors that are not right, they are the complementary colors to the normal colors in the flag. Once you stare at them long enough you become desensitized to these colors so when you look at the grayscale flag you only see the primary colors red, white, and blue. The artist also helps to draw your focus from top to bottom in a couple of ways. Firstly he uses vertical strokes in the gray area to help you start looking at the work in a vertical manner. He then has the grayscale flag popped out from the original painting, basically a smaller canvas stacked on a larger canvas. This has the impact that your final focus ends
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The biggest advantage of seeing it in person would be that you can see the optical illusion. It is a lot harder to get working off of a photo, and since the optical illusion is the whole point of the work you are missing out on a lot. Another thing that you only get in scope of in person is how large it is. From the photo it looks like a normal small portrait painting, but in reality it 's actually 6 feet tall by 3 feet wide. The way that Jaspers helps to make the flag pop even more that you can only really see in person is through his brush strokes. In the sections of the flags he only paints horizontally, while in the rest of the grayscale is in only vertical