Three Degrees of Separation
"To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist." - Jasper Johns
This post was supposed to be about Michael Crichton. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the fact of Crichton’s medical degree is secondary to his creative work, a footnote. But reading about Crichton for this post—his attitude toward medical school (he hated it) and his mind-boggling success as a novelist and screen writer (he was smart, quick, and shrewd)—I got totally sidetracked by his friendship with Jasper Johns. One mention of Johns and I couldn’t focus anymore on Jurassic Park or The Andromeda Strain. I went down a different rabbit hole entirely.
Jasper Johns is a painter, period. He is not a forensic engineer or physician or entomologist on top of it. He studies art and makes art. Brilliantly. So how does he fit into this little internet space about scientific creators and creative scientists?
Three degrees of separation, that’s how. (Stick with me, this is short).
Two weeks ago, I posted about William Carlos Williams as a painter and his relationship with Charles Demuth. Demuth’s portrait of Williams, “I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold”, was an exercise in precision, a contrast to Williams’ writing habits born from impulse of immediate observation. Johns’ work straddles this line, representations of precision (flags, maps, targets) rendered with a raw energy that centers the process more than the result.
Johns started painting numbers early in his career, another set of familiar images that could direct viewers’ attention to the technique over the subject. It was during this period that he painted “The Black Figure 5”:
“Johns had been doing his paintings of numbers for three years when, in I960, he was commissioned by Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull of New York to paint a large single number. Asking which number would be preferred, he was told five. Although our Demuth painting was not mentioned, both the patron and the artist have subsequently said that it lay behind the decision. Johns has said that he was very much aware of this Demuth when he began the painting.” (Henry Geldzahler, “Numbers in Time: Two American Paintings”)
This is Demuth’s painting stripped of color, for comparison:
Here are two artists, separated in time rendering the same simple subject in different ways for different reasons, each connected to a physician-writer whose profile ended up on my silly little blog (where I previously posted my own artwork depicting numbers in black and white).
At a time when it’s common to feel detached and isolated, or at least discouraged by the homogeny of ideas, this thread feels like a bright little discovery, a reminder of all the ways creativity inspires connection. You and me, William Carlos Williams and Jasper Johns, we’re all in this together.
Jasper Johns and Michael Crichton, from michaelcrichton.com
Michael Crichton owned several paintings by Jasper Johns and wrote a book about his work. I will write more about Crichton in the next post, after I re-watch several seasons of ER for homework. Stay tuned and pass it on.