45 Great Quotes By Jasper Johns For The Abstractionist

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

Life

  

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

  

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.

  

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

  

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

  

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

  

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

Experience , Think

  

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

Experience

  

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.

  

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

  

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Life

  

I tend to like things that already exist.

Like

  

One works without thinking how to work.

  

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

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.

  

Art is either a complaint or appeasement.

  

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.

  

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.

Life , Think

  

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

  

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 confusion, or a freedom.

  

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'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.

  

To me, self-description is a calamity.

Me

  

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.

  

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

  

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

  

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.

Never

  

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

  

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.

Experience , Life

  

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.

  

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

  

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

  

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.

Me

  

I never wish for critics.

Never

  

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

Trying

  

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

  

I am not strong on perfection.

  

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.

  

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.

  

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

Life

  

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.

Think

  

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.

  

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.

  

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.

Time