From The Archives Of Second Chance Cat Rescue-Jasper Johns

From The Archives Of Second Chance Cat Rescue-Jasper Johns 

By Laura Perkins

I am beginning to get something of a reputation in the art world, for good or evil I will let the reader figure out as we go along, as a quirky maybe even twisted critic who looks beyond form, color, genre and style. I have cultivated that aura for example when I mentioned that totem of totem Edward Hopper flunked his class in facial drawings I think with William Merritt Chase. Another good one is my unique although correct read on James McNeill Abbott Whistler’s Woman in White as nothing but a high society advertisement for a modern-day Whore of Babylon (and his shameful fobbing off his mother as a study in grey and white as well). I could go on but this gives the reader an idea.

A lot of the reputation I have built up has been in dueling one Clarence Dewar, art critic, professional art critic for Art Today. (I endlessly enjoy taunting him with that pro tag since he has made it his life’s work apparently to denigrate me as not a professional which I am not and have no intention of claiming to be by the way. Rather than letting me drift into the twilight un-mourned and unloved he has targeted me as what is wrong with the art world today when mere amateurs who love art, citizen critics he called us, have plenty of influence that used to be reserved for the likes of him and his mentor Clement Greenberg. Today’s “duel” will continue that sparring and it now fine by me since it appears there are some people out there who think quirky, think outside the box is okay.        

Which brings up the name of the modern artist (and still standing) Jasper Johns and how he got to extend the grip of abstract art a little his way. I have already mentioned in an admiring short piece that he “survived” having grown up in Greenville, the South Carolina one and later dealt with his sexual preferences in a strong manner for his times (although living in New York City with Robert Rauschenberg something of an oasis for the misfits and vagabonds of society made things easier starting out).

What people do not know is that got him interested in art, in expressing himself through that medium was spurred on by a cat, by his love of cats from what I understand. But not in the way you might thing. One cat, let’s call him Jasper as an honor to Johns, had the habit of knocking things over, knocking paints over as Johns worked. (That cat, as is not unusual, rescued from some animal shelter and hence the “second chance” of the title. That was how he saw one painting turned from a straight representational piece to what only could be called abstract art (the less well-known Piping Number 4). From that point on he worked around various themes like his well-known flag series and those targeted bulls eyes. All because a now long gone frisky cat, kitten from the photographs dumped odd paints on his work.

(Of course Dewar will go on and on about the influence of Pollack, the inevitable reference to Picasso, the influence of Rauschenberg in his make everyday things like cartons artwork. But you now know the truth).