Jasper Johns's Quotes

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

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

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

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.

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.

My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences.

Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.

The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.

Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.

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

I am not strong on perfection.

Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.

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

The thing is, if you believe in the unconscious - and I do - there's room for all kinds of possibilities that I don't know how you prove one way or another.

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.

Everyone 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.

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

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

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

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

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

I never wish for critics.

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.

I tend to like things that already exist.