John Baldessari Research Notes

John Beldessari is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California.

John burned his own paintings, put coloured dots over faces in photographs, and covered floors at the LA County Museum such as this picture. The dots on top of the peoples faces are actually conjured price stickers that John has collected. The aim of the image was to hide the peoples face and have the viewer focused onto the peoples clothes, facial expressions and surroundings to paint a scenario without using facial emotions. This photograph in particular connotes love and interest in one another  since they're very close to each other while also having a relaxed body language at the same time.

This photograph was a manipulation of paper and colours to piece together this image of the womanly figure onto of the man. In my opinion, this artwork gives a mixed impression of love and invasion of person space. The connotation of love is presented through the hand holding of this photograph. However, the connotation of invasion of personal space is connoted by the purple colour of the woman's leg, onto of the red male figure which would demonstrate some kind of authority. The green, blue, purple and pink colours of the womanly figure also demonstrate more emotion and variety to a woman's personality while the male only has the colours red and orange which could depict aggression to a mans personality.

This photograph also uses the manipulation of coloured paper as well as the collected price stickers collected by John. This photo displays an orange coloured tiger jumping through a flaming hoop with three other people behind the cage with the price stickers over their faces. This connotes the helplessness of the tiger since it is behind the cage while the other people spectate the helpless animal. The motivation to make this picture was to highlight the wrong that people are doing to these animals. Therefore this was created and adapted to John's style of artwork.