Jasper Johns Art Analysis

Jasper Johns and Device If you’re clicking through Jasper Johns’ work online for the first time, you may not be too impressed by what you see. A green square with the vague imprint of a target, an American flag placed on an orange canvas. You won’t realize just how revolutionary and influential the art you’re looking at is. Even seeing one in person won’t make it clear to you, as long as you don’t have an understanding of his art and ideas on art. Johns lies in between the cold presentation of conceptualist art shown in the Dada movement and the visually pleasing presentation of concepts seen in the Pop Art movement. His ideas were revolutionary, if not that, they were undeniably impactful. His Dada-esque concepts and unconventional process

Sometimes he used a solid color, or nearly no color at all. He saw his paintings as a surface on which he could experiment with tools and paper and found objects. Johns made his art to be “real”, meaning he did not believe in the representation of something as the real thing. “I like what I see to be real, or to be my idea of what is real.” Instead of painting a fork, he placed the fork on the painting. Instead of painting a hand, he would place his handprint on a piece. They were still paintings, they were whatever he as the artist believed they were. As Marcel Duchamp, one of his biggest influences, believed, "I don 't believe in art. I believe in

The majority of the brush strokes are small, vertical lines, with the occasional horizontal. In terms of structure, it’s not very visually appealing. There are circles of curved lines like rings on a tree, along with blocky lettering, against a mess of jagged lines and dripping paint. You’re first thought may be “It’d be nice to look at if it was cut into sections.” The colors are rich and vibrant, they’re beautiful until you’re distracted by the two chunks of circle at the top of the painting like a pair of eyes. Bright oranges and reds are almost, but not quite, dominated by shades of blue. The warm and cool colors balance each other out. There are small areas of gray and one little patch of a comforting yellow. The form of this piece is obviously a very important element, considering the painting itself even has a form and is not a sculpture. It’s also important to note that the two devices were once in motion and have been frozen in time, this is not