Top 30 Jasper Johns Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

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

I never wish for critics.

One works without thinking how to work.

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.

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.

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’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.

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

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.

I am not strong on perfection.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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