Green Angel [working proof with ink and crayon additions] 1991

This is Jasper Johns' "Green Angel," a working proof with ink and crayon additions. Just looking at it, you get a feeling of this image coming into being, shifting through trial and error. I can almost feel Johns in the studio, wrestling with this ambiguous form, this…map? Or is it a face? You can see the black ink bleeding at the edges, a dark moody ground. Then the white form—angular, but yielding. And the color! Scrawls of crayon, like kids' play, fighting against the serious ink. I love that Johns wasn't afraid to let the mess show. You see echoes of Robert Rauschenberg’s playful spirit here, that sense of anything-goes. He must have been thinking about the process of image-making itself, the act of seeing and un-seeing. Painting, for me, is never about answers. It’s about the questions, the not-knowing, the constant pushing and pulling. Artists are always riffing off each other, passing ideas around like secret notes in class. It's reassuring to know that you're part of this messy, beautiful conversation across time.