The Seasons [5th element in black 1/2 (7th state)] 1987

This is an etching by Jasper Johns. The piece is all in black and white, or rather shades of grey, built up with these really insistent hatched lines. It's like Johns is building the image through a kind of controlled density, a real system of mark making. Look at the way the lines create a kind of rain effect, falling across different zones and figures. Each of these zones feels like a fragment, a memory maybe, or a piece of a puzzle that doesn’t quite fit. There’s a real sense of layering and transparency, which is created through all these marks. It's like Johns is showing us the ghost of an image, rather than the image itself. You see this kind of fragmented, all-over composition in the work of Rauschenberg. With Johns, though, you have this added interest in process, a sense of the image emerging slowly through labor. He is not throwing paint, but using line to build an image through time.