From The Archives Of Second Change Cat Rescue- Jasper Johns Unchained 

By Laura Perkins

There was no earthy reason to believe that once I started to “duel” with one Clarence Dewar, art critic, professional art critic for Art Today (against my purely amateur status proudly worn) around the genesis of modern artist Jasper Johns work. I related the entirely possible story that one of his cats, one of his rescue cats, you know second chance cast from some animal,  shelter do way back when spilled some paint onto the surface of a representational work he was doing and that wound up with a little work keeping the piece which in term was one of his earliest attempts at breaking into the abstract expressionist market. (Piping No. 4) Began to see what guys like Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothko were getting at in the nuclear age.   

Look it is well known that artists like writers, like singers “steal” from each other. This is the genesis of Dewar’s scoffing at my story about little playful Jasper being the inspiration for Johns’ movement away from representational art. He claims, mouthing his mentor Clement Greenberg back in the day, that Johns was influenced by some paintings he saw exhibited at the Nova Galleries in New York City by a second wave of abstract artist like Roy LeRoi, May Devine, Louise Hunter and Max Stern. Naturally I am happy to see Mr. Dewar get egg all over his face since I have it on the word of one of Johns’ agents that the “cat story” is true if not the only way he saw the road forward when he was stuck for salable material. (See photograph below of "Jasper" when young and before he became a "muse")