Jasper Johns Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by 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
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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
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To me, self-description is a calamity.
~Jasper Johns
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Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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I wish there were more humor in my work than I see in it.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.
~Jasper Johns
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Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.
~Jasper Johns
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I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'
~Jasper Johns
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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
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To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
~Jasper Johns
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I am not strong on perfection.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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I never wish for critics.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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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
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I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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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
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I tend to like things that already exist.
~Jasper Johns
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I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.
~Jasper Johns
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Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.
~Jasper Johns
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Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.
~Jasper Johns
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I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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One works without thinking how to work.
~Jasper Johns
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Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.
~Jasper Johns
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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
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I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.
~Jasper Johns
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