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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

My work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing.

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

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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’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 am not strong on perfection.

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

Art is either a complaint or appeasement.

I think through living one's life, one both changes and remains the same. One can see it either way, one can see oneself as being now what one was and one can see oneself as being absolutely different from what one was. It's a trick of thought.

I'm working in my mind.

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

Marcel Duchamp, one of this century's pioneers, moved his work through the retinal boundaries which had been established with Impressionism into a field where language, thought and vision act upon one another. There it changed form through a complex interplay of new mental and physical materials, heralding many of the technical, mental and visual details to be found in more recent art... He declared that he wanted to kill art ("for myself") but his persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference altered our thinking, established new units of thought, a "new thought for that object."

One works without thinking how to work.

When you work you learn something about what you are doing and you develop habits and procedures out of what you're doing.

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.