Artist of the Week - (Linking to ABC Wednesday)

J is for Jasper Johns

born May 15, 1930

Jasper Johns is an American contemporary artist who works as a painter, printmaker and sculptor. In the late 1950’s, Jasper Johns emerged as force in the American art scene. His richly worked paintings of maps, flags, and targets led the artistic community away from Abstract Expressionism toward a new emphasis on the concrete. Johns laid the groundwork for both Pop Art and Minimalism. Today, as his prints and paintings set record prices at auction, the meanings of his paintings, his imagery, and his changing style continue to be subjects of controversy. read the rest here.

 

"To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist."

 ~Jasper Johns

 Flag

 1954-55

 (encaustic, oil and collage on fabric mounted to plywood)

42 x 61 in.
Museum of Modern Art, New York

"One night I dreamed I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it. And I did. I worked on that painting a long time. It's a very rotten painting—physically rotten—because I began it in house enamel paint, which you paint furniture with, and it wouldn't dry quickly enough. Then I had in my head this idea of something I had read or heard about: wax encaustic."

~Jasper Johns 

 Target

1958

 MoMA, New York

"Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another. "
Jasper Johns

 Map

 1961

MoMA, New York

"I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason."

~Jasper Johns

Color Linoleum Cut
5 Linoleum blocks cut by the Artist and Printed on
Handmade Kurotani Mitsumata paper
22 3/4 x 17 inches 

Racing Thoughts

 1983

 (painting, collage and assemblage)

Collaboration was an important part in advancing Johns’ own art, and he worked regularly with a number of artists including Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Naumann. In 1967, he met the poet Frank O’Hara and illustrated his book, In Memory of My Feelings.

SOURCES:

American Masters

  JasperJohns.com

The Artchive

Joseph K. Levine Fine Art

MoMA - Jasper Johns: A Retrospective

Linking to ABC Wednesday, Round 8

Happy Birthday Eva Hesse

(January 11, 1936 - May 29, 1970)

Eva Hesse biography at the artchive

Note: The photos that follow were taken by me at MoMA, NYC in 2009. The photos of others will be attributed to their respective websites.

 Pagan Sphinx Photo 2009 © All Rights Reserved

 Pagan Sphinx Photo 2009 © All Rights Reserved

 Pagan Sphinx Photo © All Rights Reserved

  Pagan Sphinx Photo © All Rights Reserved

  Untitled, 

Enamel paint, string, papier-mâché, elastic cord, 

1966 

(MoMA)

To listen to an analysis of the above piece, click here

(it's kind of amusing)

Expanded Expansion

1969

Reinforced fiberglass poles and rubberized cheesecloth. Overall: 122 x 300 inches.

 Contingent

 Allegra's Art Gallery

Sources:

The Telegraph:  Eva Hesse: her dark materials

The Estate of Eva Hesse

Artist of the Week: Louise Bourgeois b. 1911

" My emotions are disproportionate to my size. My emotions are my demons."

~ Louise Bourgeois

LOUISE BOURGEOIS: THE SPIDER, THE MISTRESS AND THE TANGERINE is a cinematic journey inside the world of a legend of modern art and an icon of feminism. Onscreen, the nonagenarian Louise Bourgeois is magnetic, mercurial and emotionally raw--an uncompromising artist whose life and work are imbued with her ongoing obsession with the mysteries of childhood. Her process is on full display in this intimate documentary, which features the artist in her studio and with her installations, shedding light on her intentions and inspirations. Louise Bourgeois has for six decades been at the forefront of successive new developments, but always on her own powerfully inventive and disquieting terms. In 1982, at the age of 71, she became the first woman to be honored with a major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the decades since, she has created her most powerful and persuasive work, including her series of massive spider structures that have been installed around the world. Filmed with unparalleled access between 1993 and 2007, LOUISE BOURGEOIS: THE SPIDER, THE MISTRESS AND THE TANGERINE is a comprehensive and dramatic documentary of creativity and revelation.

LOUISE BOURGEOIS: THE SPIDER, THE MISTRESS AND THE TANGERINE: Movie Trailer - Watch more top selected videos about: Movie_Trailers, Louise_Bourgeois:_The_Spider,_The_Mistress_And_The_Tangerine, Louise_Bourgeois, Marion_Cajori

Bourgeois interview

Louise Bourgeois:  An Intimate Look at a Provocateur

Spirals abound in Louise Bourgeois’s art. She says they make her think of control and freedom, and of strangling someone...

Spiral Woman
 

Louise with Spider IV, in 1996.

Bourgeois is best known for these sculptures and casts of giant spiders. There is a meaning in there. 

"My best friend was my mother.  She was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable and dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as a spider." 

 Modern and contemporary art sometimes takes knowing something about the artist. Bourgeois fascinates me:  both in her work and in her independent energy and spirit. I'm currently reading a book I picked up at the Williams museum store called The Runaway Girl. 

 Maman
Installed outside the Ottawa National Gallery

  "subtle", huh? hehehe  :-)

 Do You Love Me?

The Blind Leading the Blind

1947-49

wood construction and paint
" If I was to have a museum, I don't think I'd have any words on the wall at all. I want people to have a visual experience. I would show what I am working on now. "

 Spider Home

 This small sculpture is more fitting of the quote above and my favorite of the spiders Bourgeois created.

"...all my work in the past fifty years, all my subjects, have found their inspiration in my childhood.  My childhood never lost its magic, it has never lost its mystery, and it has never lost its drama."
~LB

Blind Man's Buff

 Femme Maison, 1946-47
Louise Bourgeois: Between Body and Anti-Body 

The spiral is glass, this time, hanging from the ceiling of the Guggenheim in NYC.

I recently had the pleasure of photographing the nine piece installation depicted below, which decorates a parking island in front of the Williams College Museum of Art. All of the pieces are depicted in my photographs of the exhibition by clicking here. See this post for other photos of these sculpture series.

The following three photos are my own, taken a couple of years ago at the MoMA, NYC.

 Quarantania

Seven Deadly Sins: Envy

“Envy is more implacable than hatred.”
- de La Rochefoucauld

Seeing as I'm on this Dante kick, I thought I'd post about Envy (also know as indivia in Italian)from that perspective, with perhaps a few other random things thrown in. We'll see where this goes.

According to Dante Alighieri's tour in The Divine Comedy's Inferno installment, there are nine concentric circles of Hell. Each circle representing a gradual increase in wickedness. Each circle's sinners are punished in a manner fitting to their crime.

Dante defined Envy as "love of one's own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs."

The envious end up in the second tier. Their punishment is severe: they have their eyes sewn shut with wire, because they have gained pleasure from seeing those they envy brought down.

photo by Pagan Sphinx

Marcel Jean Specter of the Gardenia
MoMA

(The choice of this sculpture is purely my own connection, as I have not been able to find any information about it and its title certainly does not give any indication of its meaning.)

Gustave Doré

Envious Penitents

And no discussion of Dante's Divine Comedy is complete without a mention of William Blake, whose illustrations for the work he is well known for

Dante and Statius Sleeping,Virgil-Watching


Lastly, I came upon this photograph of a sculpture of Blake by James. S. Deville, after uploading the photograph above, that reminded me of the punishment for Envy, in Dante's Inferno.

Join Kay for The Seven Deadly Sins Meme.

Thanks, Kay, this has been very interesting and fun for me; now smitten with both Blake and Dante. Yeah, I know. Once a nerd, always a nerd! ;-)

What's Goin' On: Another Update

Thank you again and again for your good wishes.

Changes at work with a new hire and with that, a bit of adjustment and stress. Just a touch. I'm trying hard not to let it get out of hand. Suffice it to say about work: I'm at times amazed by the things that people will say about each other. Completely subjective, arrogant, bigoted and otherwise insensitive. Ugh.

I'm also fighting hard not to become a total recluse. Blogging is good for me in the sense that I maintain contact with people, albeit not face-to-face, but at least it's a form of socialization and community. Even blogging lately has felt like a chore. I don't know if it's because I've taken on too many blogging "responsibilities", if you will. Or if it has something to do with having been sick. Or even if this lack of motivation is perhaps a life-cycle thing? Does it have to do with peri-menopause? I'm changing, I know that. None of if is freaking me out much so far. In fact, all I long for is a sort of peaceful bliss all the time. But meanwhile, I feel guilty because I'm not accomplishing enough, either in the real world or in blogging.

I face a graduate program stint in the not so distant future and I'm flaked out about it simply because I don't want to be a student. Actually, I'd love to be a student. An art history student, for example. Instead I will be enduring a year's worth of crap, most of which I already know because the state feels I need this credential. And perhaps I do but it would be nice if there was an easier, sort of more home-grown, local way to go about it. Oh and did I mention affordable? Oh, there's such a shortage of special education teachers! Oh, yeah? Then why the hell is there no financial help available to obtain the credential? It's going to cost $10,000 for me to obtain this credential. Another non-incentive.

I need the credential because it will mean a fair salary increase and perhaps even, going to another school where the classroom environment isn't so ambiguous. It's hard to explain without going into great detail, which I don't want to do publicly. Suffice it to say that the communication aspect of my classroom environment is a struggle for me. With the other adults, I mean. The children are the joy of it and the least of my concerns.

To recap: I'm seriously lacking motivation for anything yet I am not depressed. I feel at peace inside, for the most part and finding it remarkably easy to love and care for others. My weaknesses are still a lack of patience with people who convolute things too much. And a lack of patience with those who don't open up to whatever extent is necessary to work together more harmoniously. And I can be a pain in the ass sometimes, too. I interrupt when I need clarification on something, which bugs people sometimes but if I don't clarify, then by the time they're finished, I will have forgotten to ask; this being especially true when I'm dealing with a very long-winded person. Right? I really just want to get the whole story. And I can be very straightforward with people if I need to cut right to the chase, which takes some people aback. I choose my battles but when I have to fight one, I'm pretty assertive. And I can be contrary during this process. It is precisely because of this tendency, that I have learned (the hard way sometimes) to choose my battles.

A little bit more about me that you may not have expected to read. I hope it's okay...

Love and thanks,
Pagan Sphinx


This was the other Frida Khalo that is at the MoMA. It's not a good photo and so better off reduced in size as posted.