Real Fun with Flags (at the RA)

RA the place to see Jasper

There's a TV 'internet feature' within TV's Big Bang called 'Fun with Flags' - well yesterday I visited London's RA and was tremendously excited to see Iconic paintings from Jasper Johns famed for his 'Flags' (and other things).


It feels odd in some ways but there was real excitement for me in seeing the pictures on show - I'm going to have to make a second visit after doing some research into Johns.

[The first part which was looking at this from Andy Warhol on YouTube]


Johns was from an Art family, was raised mainly by his Grandparents.  The lack of family influence in his artistic development did not seem to limit him in his later work (and perhaps even had the

opposite effect).

Jasper Johns -He's still alive

Johns was perhaps more of an expert in Collage than a straightforward painter.

Well known amongst the Pop artists a friend of Robert Rauschenberg - his work is hugely influential and part of the antidote to the abstractions of artists like Jack the Dripper, Mark Rothko and Barnet Newman  that 'Pop' swept away

Johns experiments are brave and often work - his 'Painting with Two Balls' remains surprising and humorous.

The artist is famed for the way his paintings are both about things and the things they are about (like his flags, numbers and maps)
.
Nice intro for the exhibition here.


My personal favourites were work about Seasons which include several of the same items and silhouettes through Summer, Spring  Fall and Winter also intrigued by the more recent 'Nothing at all Richard Dadd (1992)' - Dadd was a British artist who spent much of his life incarcerated having killed his own father.

For me there's a strong presence of George Braque in much of John's work.

More on my RA  visit soon, I saw another exhibition there which featured an artist who was of one of Jasper John's big inspirations -Marcel Duchamp.

Bye Fats

As for  Jasper Johns (above) - I was under the mistaken impression that Fats Domino was no longer with us - well that's the case now he died recently at the age of 89, a private man with a sense of humour and family, lauded by Elvis Presley, a star of the Best Sound-tracked Rock & Roll Film (The Girl Can't Help It) and his cover of the Beatles Domino inspired Rocker  Lady Madonna that rare thing a Beatles cover that exceeds the original  - here it is ..