Jasper Johns Quotes

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.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

I am not strong on perfection.

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

What you might consider a bad work can be of extreme interest to an artist in ways which are not about its being a good or bad.

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

To me, self-description is a calamity.

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

I never wish for critics.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

I tend to like things that already exist.

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns

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.

- Jasper Johns

I wish there were more humor in my work than I see in it.

- Jasper Johns

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

- Jasper Johns