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Jasper Johns, 'Diver', 1962-3

 



My eye is drawn to an overall sense of darkness. The monochrome palette made up of charcoal and pastel sucks the viewer in, plunging them into the canvas and echoing the title of the piece. This is foregrounded by Johns' stencilling of the word Diver on the bottom left hand corner of the piece, barely visible against the murky colours. The capitalisation of the word seems like a warning - do not be pulled under. Diver has been interpreted to be Johns paying homage to the suicide of Hart Crane, an American poet who jumped overboard a ship in the 1930s, his body never being recovered. With this interpretation in mind, both the dark colour palette and warning label below the anchor shape depicted are even more emotionally effective. 

If Johns is referencing Crane's suicide, he takes the human element of the painting further. Johns said that he wanted to convey the idea of a 'swan dive' through this depiction. Despite an overall darkness, there are graceful movements to the brushwork. As one swan dives towards the water, their arms sweep out, just as Johns has swept his brush across the mounted canvas to create the head of the anchor shape. The body is a vertical line during the dive, Johns using the line of connection between the two panels in the centre of the piece to portray this. The title is not 'dive' or 'diving', but the 'er' again amplifies the sense of humanity behind the piece, giving its sense of purpose. In addition, Johns has dotted handprints about the painting, adding depth to an otherwise flat, monochrome picture plane. The work therefore does not just have vertical depth, but also three dimensional depth, the hands standing out to the viewer and interacting with their eye. The handprints at the base of the anchor in particular hark back to the idea of the swan dive, the hands pulling apart to the create the arc that forms the head of the anchor. 

Johns' inclusion of the anchor shape, however, adds weight to the piece. Not only does the strong, vertical and the approximate symmetry of the anchor imply depth and downward movement, but even the eye itself seems to be dragged downward. The painting itself is large, and would be especially evocative on the white walls of the modern galley space. Often critics compare a dark colour palette to the artist's apparent state of mind - Mark Rothko used dark tones throughout the 1970s to perhaps signal a man spiralling further into depression. With Crane's suicide in mind, there is definitely a darker reading to the painting, with seemingly no light breaking through and no hope of reaching the surface once again. The viewer is instead anchored to the painting, not able to look away, dragged down towards the seabed and the abyss. The colours envelope the real world, and it becomes our very own handprints on the canvas that claw at the darkness, desperately trying to find the light.

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