Jasper Johns Quotes

63 quotes in 683 categories

• To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
• 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,…
• Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
• I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.
• I tend to like things that already exist.
• 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…
• 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.…
• Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.
• Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.
• 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…
• 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.…
• One works without thinking how to work.
• Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.
• 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…
• 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…

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