Jasper Johns Quotes

It's simple, you just take something and do something to it, and then do something else to it. Keep doing this, and pretty soon you've got something.

Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.

One wants one's work to be the world, but of course it's never the world. The work is in the world; it never contains the whole thing.

I'm not looking for images, They just appear and take on an interest. Sometimes you look at a thing and it has no interest and then you see it in a different way and it has another meaning. Or something that was of no use will become useful.

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion.

My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.

I feel that works of art are an opportunity for people to construct meaning, so I don't usually tell what they mean. It conveys to people that they have to participate.

I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason.

I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.

I'm working in my mind.

In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.

I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.

There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

Art is either a complaint or appeasement.

I tend to like things that already exist.

I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.

I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.

Merce is my favorite artist in any field.

Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.

There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.

In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and partly due to my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.

There was very little art in my childhood.

Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.

I'm not sure what 'coming out right' means. It often means that what you do holds a kind of energy that you wouldn't just put there, that comes about through grace of some sort.

I’m interested in things which suggest the world rather than express the personality... The most conventional thing, the most ordinary - it seems to me that those things can be dealt with without having to judge them; they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy.

I never wish for critics.

One works without thinking how to work.

Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.

Everybody is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.

Generally, I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks busy to me.

To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.

One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.

Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.

I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.

I have meant what I have done. Or I have often meant what I have done. Or I have sometimes meant what I have done. Or I have tried to mean what I was doing.

I am not strong on perfection.

I think that one wants from a painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement. It has to be what you can't avoid saying.

To me, self-description is a calamity.

I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.

A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.

A-not-complete-unit, or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together. One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of "thought." It is not "thought" which needs showing.

I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.

When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.

I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.

Make something, a kind of object, which as it changes or falls apart (dies as it were) or increases in its parts (grows as it were) offers no clue as to what its state or form or nature was at any previous time. Physical and Metaphysical. Obstinacy. Could this be a useful object?

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.