Mixed Media Art for Sale

Dreaming of painting an American flag as a child, icon Jasper Johns went on to create one of 20th century’s seminal mixed media works of art. Characterized by its runny paint and textural brushwork, Flag (1954-55) established the Southern-born Johns’ reputation as a significant artist. The story goes that when walking through Savannah’s Madison Square with his father, the elder Johns pointed to a monument to Revolutionary War Sergeant William Jasper, 2nd South Carolina Regiment. His son, he said, was the soldier’s namesake. Sergeant Jasper lost his life raising the American flag.

Flag began with oil-based enamel paint, completed in the encaustic medium of combining pigment with hot wax. Strips of fabric and newspaper served as adhesive for the encaustic. As pigmented wax hardens quickly, Johns could keep adding strips of the saturated cloth or paper, confident that what he’d done previously would be set and undisturbed.

Over time, Johns created more than 40 artworks based on the US flag, including Three Flags, a 1958 artwork with three superimposed, successively diminishing flags and a total of 84 stars. Flags, he was known to say, are emblems that are seen but not truly examined, something he took up as a personal cause.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen purchased Flag in 2010 for a record $110 million, making it the most expensive painting ever by a living artist. The majority owner of the NY Mets, Cohen owns one of the world’s most coveted private art collections valued at more than $1 billion.

Featuring such luminaries as Picasso, Monet, Manet, Koons, Jackson Pollock, Keith Haring, Giacometti, Damien Hirst, Andy Warhol, and emerging artists he and wife Alexandra believe it is important to support, some of the collection lives inside the couple’s 35,000 s.f. Greenwich, Conn. estate. Much of it is rotated quarterly among offices in Stamford, Conn., New York, London, and Asia. Interestingly, individual artworks are not enshrined in the recesses of occasionally-used conference rooms or little-used company libraries. Instead paintings and sculptures are informally placed in oft-passed corners and high traffic hallways so that employees have consistent access to them.

One of seven children and the son of a dress manufacturer and piano teacher, in high school Cohen found his passion in poker, crediting it with an education in risk taking. While a student at Wharton, a friend reportedly helped the risk taker open a brokerage account with $1,000 of his own tuition money.

The artists at UGallery use a range of materials to illustrate their personal histories. Read what contemporary mixed media artists Linnie Brown and Libby Ramage have to say.

“Using places in my life as a motif, I create layered artworks with collage, paint, printmaking, and drawing that reference the complexity and influence of a location. I am interested in the idea that we are an accumulation of our past. All of the experiences we have had in specific homes, schools, cities, and other locations uniquely merge together to influence the way we currently view and engage in life.” - Linnie Brown, Mixed media abstract artist

“I have taught art to very young children for almost 20 years, my own inspiration drawn from the fearless way they approach the subject. I take the scraps of life and weave them into grief, humor, and passion, using primarily charcoal, watercolors, and acrylics on collaged materials and handmade papers.” - Libby Ramage, Mixed media collage artist