“The Cicada title has to do with the image of something bursting through its skin, which is what they do. You have all those shells where the back splits and they've emerged. And basically that kind of splitting form is what I tried to suggest.”
—Jasper Johns
Beginning in 1972, Jasper Johns created his motif of crosshatched lines, experimenting with colors, patterns, mirrors, and reversals that he developed and re-worked over the next twelve years; the lines would soon manifest in a variety of paintings, works on paper, drawings, screenprints, and lithographs. According to Johns, the inspiration for his crosshatching came from "a pattern of slanted lines on the diagonal, a sort of cross-hatching that he glimpsed on a car that quickly passed him on the Long Island Expressway,” the artist recalled. "I only saw it for a second, but knew immediately that I was going to use it. It had all the qualities that interest me – literalness, repetitiveness, an obsessive quality, order with dumbness, and the possibility of a complete lack of meaning."
In Cicada, the spirited primary colors of red, yellow, and blue burst through interspersed inky black lines, an emergence that recalls the life cycle of a cicada: dormant underground for over a decade, the insect debuts to the surface as a nymph, its shell soon splitting down the middle and cracking open so the creature can fly free. Further echoing the summery sound of a cicada’s mating buzz, Johns’ crosshatched lines offer a visual cacophony, a composition charged with such dynamic energy that it nearly vibrates from its paper.
