Summer (frontispiece for "Poems" by Wallace Stevens) [proof 2nd state] 1985

This is Jasper John’s Summer, a print from 1985, made as a frontispiece for a book of poetry. Look at the way the forms emerge out of fields of marks, lines, and textures. The image is built up out of discrete marks; it’s about artmaking as a process of accretion. The work is monochromatic, yet the density of marks gives you such a rich range of grays. The cross hatching on the brick wall sets off the smudged ghostliness of the figure, which is echoed again in the floating face, like a memory conjured out of pattern. In contrast, the disc is rendered with these wild circular striations, almost as if Johns is enacting motion. I love how the arm cuts across the wheel. Johns is so clearly in dialogue with the history of art, but he's also paving his own way. Think about Rauschenberg, another artist working with found imagery, but compare that to Johns's interest in art as a thing, an object. Ultimately, art is an ongoing conversation, embracing ambiguity rather than definitive meanings.