Batman After Velázquez
Oil on canvas glued on birch
96.5 x 185.4 cm
On Request
Oil on canvas glued on birch, 2011-2012 Artist: Jake Johnson, Dimensions: 73" x 38" The conception of oil painting began as a statement of wealth. Landscapes with castles overlooking their lands filled with the owner’s livestock. Tables filled with exotic foods and expensive crystal to display possessions. Mythological scenes were stories of high society, privileged knowledge only to the wealthy. Pretentious portraits of royalty; it isn’t their faces that glow in these compositions, but their dresses. These artists of past were not true visionaries in the sense that they were restricted and confined to the commerce painting. Their works were driven by the wealthy few that collected them. The artists that we consider today to be true master artists of this past; Rubens, Vermeer, Velazquez… were the ones that broke free of a limited monetary drive. It was their art that began to take on deeper meanings, to celebrate and examine our human condition. The results were masterpieces that have stood the test of time; they are always fresh, always relevant. They speak to the very depths of our souls. They are immortal. These paved way for an influx of different ideas about art and what it could be. In the centuries that followed, there was a “rebirth” of classicism, romanticism, and realism that lead to the revolting Impressionists that were scoffed at by art establishments. Rebelling against the status quo artists began to think out of the box with the birth of Surrealism and Dadaism. Abstract expressionism produced canvases of pure raw emotion that had never been seen before with a departure from an academic way of approaching art. All of this led to a deepening conceptualism above the original inception of craft. Although poetic, I believe this also has its limitations. Again art has fallen into a luxurious circle, not always understood by all that are not privileged to the knowledge of this elaborate history. Art has again been constrained by its cash value of the collectors’ circle. My youthful instinct was always to rebel against a dysfunctional system. Ironically I find that contemporary art has reached that deteriorated state. I have been to school, and I was the outcast: The spectacle against the intolerant and dogmatic way of thinking. They couldn’t understand why I was driven for many years to learn the art of painting from the crafts persons that preceded me. This isn’t to re-live some past glory, quite the contrary: It is to mock it. To take back what cannot be sold: Our sense of humanity. In this way painting is no longer something of a long forgotten past: It is new and just beginning.