JOHN CAGE
75 Stones, 1989
Color spit bite aquatints with sugar lift aquatint on smoked paper
54 x 41 in.
Missing stone, 1989
Set of 2 color spit bite aquatints with sugar loft aquatint on smoked paper
54 x 41 in.
10 stones, 1989
Color spit bite and sugar lift aquatints on smoked paper
19 x 23 in.
River Rocks and Smoke, 4/11/90, 1990
Water color on paper prepared with smoke
27 x 40 in.
River Rocks and Smoke, 4/12/90, 1990
Water color on paper prepared with smoke
27 x 40 in.
John Cage
John Cage (1912ā€“1992) was a titan of the American avant-garde who dissolved the boundaries between music, visual art, and philosophy through a lifelong commitment to chance operations and Zen-like egoloss. Initially famous as a musical “inventor,” Cage revolutionized the 20th-century soundscape by creating the prepared pianoā€”placing bolts and screws inside the instrument to alter its timbreā€”and composing the infamous 4’33”, which framed ambient silence as music. In the latter part of his career, he seamlessly translated this “indeterminacy” to the visual arts, producing a vast body of roughly 900 works including intricate etchings at Crown Point Press and experimental watercolors at the Mountain Lake Workshop. Whether tracing stones in his Ryoanji drawings, “smoking” paper with open flames, or using the I Ching to determine the placement of a musical note or a brushstroke, Cageā€™s multi-disciplinary legacy remains a singular pursuit of finding beauty in the unplanned and the everyday.
