Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: My name is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.
I’m a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribe of Western Montana, and I’m an artist.
I always was aware of Jasper Johns’s work, and I was drawn to it. It’s hard to say exactly, not just his paint strokes, but I think his use of materials.
I randomly went through and then made a list of materials that he used: oil paint, watercolor, pencil, graphite, crayon, lithography, wax, metallic powder, synthetic vellum, paper, rag paper, plaster, pastel, graphite, wash color pencil, charcoal, collage, and I know there’s more.
There are a lot of paintings, works on paper that may appear to be colorless, and, in fact, they’re not. In fact, when you study them and you look at them, you’ll find quite a range of color.
When you study these works all together in a group, you begin to see that there’s a world of interior color. I use that word because interior color, I put that together because I was thinking that, when he’s working through this, if he controls the amount of material he uses, controls the image, then in a sense, he’s free to explore.
