Jasper Johns Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

One's range [of ideas] is limited by one's interests and imagination and by one's passion.

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

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

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

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.

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 tend to like things that already exist.

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

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

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

I would like to have insights into things like government, all those big ideas that you brought up that I simply don't have ideas about. I would like to be able to since so many people discuss them, but I don't want to work at them. I don't think my ambition is that strong in that direction.

That’s what painting does; it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization.

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

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

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.

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

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.

To me, self-description is a calamity.

Merce is my favorite artist in any field.