About Jasper Johns: Jasper Johns is an American painter and printmaker.
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 likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.
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.
Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.
I am not strong on perfection.
To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.
Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
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.
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.
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.
To me, self-description is a calamity.
Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
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 ...
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.
In my early work, I tried to hide my personality, my psychological state, my emotions. This was partly due to my feelings about myself and party due to my feelings about painting at the time. I sort of stuck to my guns for a while but eventually it s...
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...
I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.
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.
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. An...
Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.
