Using a painting as a point of departure for finished drawings and prints is typical of the manner in which he transforms objects into images. Johns subsequently made four drawings and two lithographs based on the encaustic Souvenir, and three drawings and a lithograph inspired by Souvenir 2. This is unusually personal for Johns, who normally uses standard stencilled letters to spell out words and even his signature on paintings. In Souvenir 2, the oil, both photograph and stencilled words are seen in colour the title Souvenir, appears in the lower centre in handwritten script. In Souvenir, the original shadowy version in encaustic, the photograph and stencilled lettering on the plate are black and white. The expressionless portrait that stoically meets our gaze, of a photograph of the artist’s face printed on a plate, suggests a pun, perhaps on his name, since the most famous head on a platter is that of St John the Baptist, the inspiration for the Baptist religion in which Southerner Jasper Johns was raised. Serving his image on a plate suggests the artist expects to be devoured by acquisitive diners.

In any event, throughout his work there are constant analogies between seeing and eating, creating parallels between taste and sight. Perhaps one reason he was drawn to encaustic as a medium was because it was like cooking. Johns is known to be an excellent cook with an interest in food. Like the first Souvenir, the works that first brought Johns fame – a 1955 painting of the US flag and two paintings of targets – were painted in encaustic, an ancient tradition requiring heating wax and brushing it on evenly as one would frost a cake. Nobody can eat from the vertically-sited plate, which in life would serve food, but in art equates looking with eating. No image can be seen on the canvas sealed from view, which serves only to raise the viewer’s curiosity about the front of the canvas that is not visible. The plate in Souvenir 2 rests against the back of a stretched canvas glued to the surface, so that the viewer can only guess what, if anything, appears on the obverse. It is, however, significant that its original function is to look backwards. The mirror reflects nothing visible to the viewer from its oblique angle. The flashlight normally powered by an electronic battery is dead. Significantly, all the familiar objects are deprived of their practical functions instead they are assigned a purely formal role as three-dimensional elements in a basically geometric assemblage composition. Both include a flashlight attached vertically to the right edge of the canvas pointing up towards a rear-view mirror angled downwards, presumably to reflect a non-existent beam of light from the flashlight directed at a wooden ledge that supports the upright plate. Souvenir is an encaustic painting Souvenir 2 is an oil. Johns incorporated them into twin paintings titled Souvenir and Souvenir 2 that he made in a studio in Tokyo during this two-month trip. The cheap, mechanically produced photograph, surrounded by stencilled letters spelling out the primary colours, was printed on porcelain dinner plates. On this trip, he was returning as a 34-year-old tourist. In Japan, ordinary activities like wrapping a package, preparing tea or arranging flowers demand the same ritualistic attention and precision as high art, which appears to have impressed him. He had first become acquainted with Japanese culture and traditions, important to him throughout his life, when he had served in Japan during the Korean War as a young soldier. On a trip to Japan in the spring of 1964, Jasper Johns took a photograph of himself in a Tokyo photo booth.

From the Autumn 2017 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.

Jasper high school spring formal