Jasper Johns at the Royal Academy and Paradise Lost by Pablo Auladell

From Paradise Lost by Pablo Auladell

Sometimes an artwork comes to my attention that I'm in awe of. Coming across two things in the same week is a rarity but last week was one of those weeks. I had been down to London on the weekend to see the Jasper Johns exhibition and I thought it was wonderful and then during the week I came across the illustrated version of Paradise Lost by Pablo Auladell. Both of these experiences made me think about drawing but in totally different ways. 

From Paradise Lost by Pablo Auladell

Pablo Auladell is one of those artists that straddles the divide between illustration and fine art. It's a difficult line to tread but one that I'm convinced lies very close to what makes drawing a powerful and significant art form. In some ways both Johns and Auladell tell a story. Auladell is revisiting Paradise Lost like so many artists before him, he has to reinvent the images relying on the same text that stimulated Dore and Blake, but he has to find a way to do this that makes the drawings relevant to us now, to people of the post Modern era, a time of agnosticism and little faith in religion or politics. Auladell develops an image of Satan as an ordinary man, as a man struggling to find a place for himself. The images are post-Freud, they reflect on a son who has disobeyed his father, who choses a hat to single himself out, who can fly, but who has wings that never quite seem to fit. 

Gustave Dore: Paradise Lost

William Blake: Paradise Lost

Jasper Johns is an old man now and the exhibition at the Royal Academy covers the whole range of his life's work. From his flags and numbers and on through to much more autobiographic images made as he gets older. 

Jasper Johns

The rich variations of mark making in this charcoal drawing of numbers above makes for both a beautiful drawing and a space for contemplation. Numbers are peculiarly human inventions and in drawing them with such sensitivity they are elevated in status and in effect they become portraits of humanity. Kant spoke about, "an intuition of the bare two-oneness" when reflecting on the moment numbers came into being, at some point he theorised, one individual human must have had an intuition of the idea of counting, of the difference between one and two and that two was twice one. 

Jasper Johns

As Johns gets older he begins to reflect on the stages of life that he has been through and attempts to develop metaphors from the various types of iconography that he has developed over the years.It is as if the various elements of his practice come back to haunt him and he can't let them go, they have in effect supplanted him. By trying to avoid making images of himself, and instead using objects and fragments of images from other artists he has encountered during his own career as an artist, he has in effect created another self portrait. Just as the numbers become substitutes for humanity, the images full of references to a lifetime's work become substitutes for portraits of Johns in his old age. 

Jasper Johns

The drawing of numbers above was in particular a fascinating image. It is a large drawing that drifts in and out of focus, some areas dark with heavy mark making and others faint with repeated erasures. The drawing pulses with life, it flickers between one number and another as if trying to count itself, as if trying to count for the first time and stumbling over the effort. 

Pablo Auladell

Pablo Auladell also uses the full emotional range of charcoal, he rubs out the greys of a streaky sky and his angels become black ragged birds, beings without their former power. His Satan a gangly ungainly man, who is still trying to stand up for himself even in defeat. 

Pablo Auladell

Auladell inhabits the world of the graphic novel, a tradition of comic art rather than the one of fine art. However I would argue that in these small isolated frames, he is able to make us think again of a moment in literature when for the first time Satan began to have attributes of humanity, Milton perhaps intuiting the man written figure as a product of literary invention rather than a story handed down from God, and in that intuition saw that Satan and his fall was simply yet another metaphor for all of us humans, that in effect we all fall when leaving our parents. We all have to face both a rejection and a realisation that we are both our own worse enemies and the solution to our own problems. Both Johns and Auladell using the rich possibilities of charcoal to give materiality to ideas about what it is to be a human being, to be a creature that creates its own signs and languages, to be a creature with a limited life span and one that is born into a family and to be a creature that has to at some point stand up on its own two feet, but that will at another point have to relinquish all that he or she has achieved. 

The Johns exhibition is on until the 10th of December, do try and get there if you can, Pablo Auladell's Paradise Lost is available from Jonathan Cape and was published in 2016. 

Jasper Johns: An old man drawing

I've been looking at some recent work by Jasper Johns entitled 'Regrets' which consists of a group of two paintings, 10 drawings, and two prints created over a year and a half and exhibited for the first time last year at MOMA. 
Johns is now well into his 80s and was of course a powerful influence on both Pop Art and Conceptual Art during the 1960s. I have already pointed to his importance to the art world in an earlier post, but I'm also personally very interested in what he is now doing as an older artist, (perhaps because I'm of an age to have felt Johns' original influence in the 1960s), I'm fascinated to see that he is still working and still able to generate images that can hold my attention. 
For someone new to Johns' art perhaps one of the most important things to grasp is that he is essentially a process artist. However I thought that in this series of works the image he is processing is particularly poignant. 
Johns had been looking through a series of images that came from the reconstruction of Frances Bacon's studio in Dublin. One image was of a photograph of Lucien Freud that Bacon had had taken when he was thinking of making Freud's portrait. The photograph was crumpled, ripped and torn, a whole section missing from the bottom half. 

As you can see from the photograph above Bacon must have spent some time with it investigating possibilities for a painting. On seeing this image Johns decided that it was worth investigating. What it was that captured his attention he doesn’t say so one can only conjecture. I suspect what resonated was that Freud had recently died, and was of a similar age to Johns. They never, as far as I know, met, but both were regarded as international masters of contemporary painting. Freud holds his head as if agonising over something, and of course this being an image found in Frances Bacon’s studio, (another ‘master’ of contemporary art) this anguish or introspection must have been something Bacon was interested in as a possibility for one of his very expressive paintings. Johns of course is known for his personal reserve, for not showing any emotion in his work and for being a more ‘cerebral’ artist. Perhaps Johns saw this image as a type of ‘vanitas’ (Vanitas themes in painting and the overlapping motif of the Memento mori, were meant to remind viewers of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death), being of the age he is and aware that both Bacon and Freud are now dead, perhaps reminding Johns of his own coming demise. Whatever caused Johns to select this image, what he does next is perhaps of more interest for those of you interested in his process.

The first thing Johns does is to simply draw what he sees. 

As you can see from the drawing everything has taken on an equal importance, the torn out section and the creases are just as important as the photographic image. For Johns how to work from photographs has been a long running problem, and this way of working allows him to 'see' the photograph as an object and he has asserted in the past that he is always seeking to ensure that his paintings are objects and not windows on the world. 

I think he may even have traced the initial image directly from the catalogue page he found it on. This would have allowed him to easily make his next step.

He has mirrored the first image and made a new image by filling in both halves of the new image differently. One side he has crayoned in using primary and secondary colours and on the other side he has filled in the shapes with a grey wash. Because the edges of folds and crumples are just as important as images, the overall image itself is now becoming much harder to read and a new unexpected image has arrived due to the mirroring process. Over what was simply a torn out shape, has now appeared a 'skull'. The torn out shape now becoming a vest like body. Johns has used skulls in his work before, so he would have been quick to recognise the image when it arrived. 

It's interesting that in this print from the 1970s, Johns has put a cross through his signature. 

Once he has realised that the image on mirroring contains another (discovered)  image he sets off to make the composition more interesting. 

He crops the left side of the image so that the bi-lateral symmetry is removed, (there is an image stage before this but I haven't had the time to scan it in, I will at some point) he then begins to explore ways of working over the surface so that the mark takes precedence over the image. 

You should just about be able to see the 'vest' shape near the centre.

Detail of the drawing above. 

Johns then proceeds to explore possibilities of surface excitement by working in ink on plastic film. This means that he is able to work within the outlines he has constructed for himself, but unable to control the flow of the ink, because on plastic it flows uncontrollably and makes blobs and thickens and thins unpredictably. 

Detail

Johns then makes several of these drawings in ink. (If you want to try working in this way the print room down in Vernon Street stocks rolls of 'true grain' which is transparent plastic sheet used for making photographic exposures for silk screens, and I would suggest that Johns came across this method of working when doing exactly that, preparing to make a silk screen by painting ink on plastic sheet). 

Sometimes the image is coming through more clearly than at others, the 'mood' changing as black becomes more dominant or soft greys spread throughout. 

Finally Johns takes the image into print. Using etching processes to further explore the possibilities. 

'Regrets' Etching

Etching detail, from the central 'vest' shape, showing use of soft ground technique, whereby a textured surface is pushed into the soft wax ground and the resultant removal of wax allowing acid to eat out the metal to create a similar texture. 

Once in print Johns can really easily make variations, as you can see from this wall of images the basic design now hosts a wide variety of tonal and textual developments. 

While his work in drawing is developing possibilities for the image he is also painting. These two images below being the result. 

Regrets 1 Jasper Johns

Regrets 2 Jasper Johns

The final paintings have moved a long way from the original photographic image. Whether or not you are interested to them as images, the process is still a useful one and one that above all allows Johns as an artist to discover images as he works. What so many artists find hard is setting off to make a new image, if you try and get one straight from your head, it will nearly always be a cliché, therefore Johns, like so many artists uses a process that allows him to discover what it is that he is doing as he does it. 

See also

Johns at the Royal Academy 

Drawing on transparent drafting film

Drawing now MOMA