SFX: Waves crashing on shore. Foghorn in the distance.

NARRATOR:

At the time Jasper Johns made this painting, he said: “I had the sense of arriving at a point where there was no place to stand.” He called it Land’s End.

SFX: Ocean waves crashing on shore below us, as if we are standing on a cliff looking out to sea

NARRATOR:

He named it after a poem by Hart Crane, who wrote a lot about the sea. The gray tones, washing over the painting in thick brushstrokes, and thin, fluid drips, have the feeling of a dark and roiling ocean.

SFX: OCEANIC SOUND BED which rises and becomes more complex, slowly turns into something less recognizable, evoking a sense of being subsumed by the ocean

NARRATOR:

That imprint of a hand you see on the canvas? That’s his.

GARY GARRELS:

I think one of the most immediate things about the experience of looking at Land’s End is a sense of slipping.

NARRATOR:

That’s curator Gary Garrels.

GARRELS:

The colors are slipping; the letters are slipping and sliding—they’re falling.

SFX: The water rises, evoking a sense of being subsumed by the ocean, being pulled under, bubbles, whooshes, a single note of music to change the focus to a more interior dimension

SFX: Slow fade on underwater sounds