Art Club: Jasper Johns

This week in our art class, this week, we started to look at the work of Jasper Johns (born May 15, 1930). An American painter, sculptor and printmaker associated with Abstract expressionism, Neo-Dada, and Pop art. He took his inspiration from the most ordinary things around us, like numbers and maps. He created several works using numbers zero to nine. Here is my initial sketch from the lesson on Monday - we will develop this idea, and take it to a more abstract level, next week. It's a great opportunity to explore and play with colour.

A4 with water soluble wax crayons

16/01/2017 Update
This week I experimented with maps and words. The biggest thing I learned was that I'm not really happy with creating abstract work - it's either because I have no idea when to stop, or I am second guessing what other people might think. Practice makes for a more confident artist and so I had two quite different tries, but I will certainly come back to this again.

I used google maps for my stimulus: using at both the satellite version and the 'roads only' version.
I looked for large geometric shapes, and then textures within them. As a finishing touch I stamped the names of some roads and suburbs onto the second painting.
Below, you can see the steps I went through to create each one.

So my two maps are not as abstract as Jasper Johns - and make less of a statement as a result. However, I did enjoy the process and will get braver in my future attempts.

These two collages show the steps I followed while doing maps of my local area

For the art session itself, we decided to go with lettering. The forms and colourplay were all there still, with the bonus of a clear outcome, in this case a very positive outcome.
Here is just one of the finished pieces: