Jasper Johns was born in 1930 in Augusta, Georgia. Johns didn’t take any formal art lessons as a child but he knew he wanted to be an artist. In 1949 he moved to New York City to study at the Parsons School of Design. There were a lot of artists working in the city at that time and Johns made friends with some of them. He was drafted into the army soon after arriving in New York City When he returned from war, Johns began to experiment with different styles. At the time, Abstract Expressionism (the movement that included Jackson Pollock) was the popular artistic style. For the Abstract Expressionists, art was all about showing emotion, John’s work is the opposite. This may be one reason his art became as popular as it did. Johns painted objects that everyone could recognize, like flags, numbers (and more numbers), targets, letters and maps. The paintings don’t show Johns’ opinions, in fact the artwork may not have any particular meaning at all. His paintings show us things that we have seen hundreds of times and often just ignore, but we don’t ignore Johns’ paintings. Instead, we study them and find new meaning in the objects he shows us.
The students in the Virtuoso program created colourful works of art using only food colouring, paint, foam printing plate and their art making skills. Inspired by Johns’ paintings of letters they started off by painting a rice paper in many colours using droppers and food colouring. Next they used a foam printing plate made out of leftover sticking foam sheet and acrylic paint to make the image of the alphabet. After some experimenting with brayer rollers and so many layers of paint the student finalised their project and learned that every object can be turned into a beautiful piece of art.