Jasper Johns quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Jasper Johns

Jasper Johns Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Jasper Johns on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

One works without thinking how to work.

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

I never wish for critics.

I would tend to say that I do what I do as well as possible and that most people don't.

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

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

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

It's almost just a difference of mood as to whether I would describe myself one way or the other. I think I share that experience with most people.

To me, self-description is a calamity.

I'm working in my mind.

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.

Merce is my favorite artist in any field,

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

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

Art is either a complaint or appeasement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I am not strong on perfection.

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.

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

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

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

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

I tend to like things that already exist.

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

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

Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.

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.

Put a lot of paint & a wooden ball or other object on a board. Push to the other end of the board. Use this in a painting. - ruler on board.

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