Letter to My Son 1957

Asger Jorn made this painting, Letter to My Son, with oil on canvas. I can almost see him building it up, one intuitive mark at a time. It is such a trip how Jorn mixed figuration with abstraction – the loose, gestural marks forming cartoonish faces and figures. Look at the crude red lines and daubs of yellow. It’s like a visual game of telephone, where images emerge and dissolve, never quite settling into one form. I imagine him layering the paint, scraping it back, adding more, lost in a playful process of discovery. I think Jorn was definitely riffing off of the work of other painters. He and Karel Appel were part of the COBRA group, a collective that was all about spontaneity and experimentation. It makes me wonder what it was like for Jorn as a dad. But for me, painting is like this ongoing conversation across time, where artists borrow, steal, and transform each other's ideas.