Top 50 Jasper Johns Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

3. “It’s simple, you just take something and do something to it, and then do something else to it. Keep doing this, and pretty soon you’ve got something.”

— Jasper Johns

4. “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”

— Jasper Johns

5. “Art is either a complaint or appeasement.”

— Jasper Johns

6. “One works without thinking how to work.”

— Jasper Johns

7. “I am not strong on perfection.”

— Jasper Johns

Featured in: Strong Quotes

8. “I’m working in my mind.”

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

10. “I feel that works of art are an opportunity for people to construct meaning, so I don’t usually tell what they mean. It conveys to people that they have to participate.”

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

12. “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.”

— Jasper Johns

13. “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. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.”

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

15. “To me, self-description is a calamity.”

— Jasper Johns

16. “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.”

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

20. “I would like to have insights into things like government, all those big ideas that you brought up that I simply don’t have ideas about. I would like to be able to since so many people discuss them, but I don’t want to work at them. I don’t think my ambition is that strong in that direction.”

— Jasper Johns

Featured in: Strong Quotes

21. “Every artist feels alone and isolated, Friends are very important in terms of all sorts of definitions of oneself. They tell you what you are and what they are aside from the intellectual aspects.”

— Jasper Johns

22. “I’m not looking for images, They just appear and take on an interest. Sometimes you look at a thing and it has no interest and then you see it in a different way and it has another meaning. Or something that was of no use will become useful.”

— Jasper Johns

23. “Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.”

— Jasper Johns

24. “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

25. “Bend color names which should be made of neon or copper tubing. Place an object on a surface – trace the object – then bend the object – leaving some part of it attached.”

— Jasper Johns

26. “Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.”

— Jasper Johns

27. “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

28. “I don’t know how to organise thoughts. I don’t know how to have thoughts.”

— Jasper Johns

29. “I tend to like things that already exist.”

— Jasper Johns

30. “Art as a fantasy has been one of my earliest experiences. I suppose a lot of my childhood was a fantasy that involved getting away from things I didn’t like. Fortunately it had some relationship to reality so that later I was able to, to some extent, act as I imagined I might.”

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

32. “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

33. “I never wish for critics.”

— Jasper Johns

34. “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

35. “When you work you learn something about what you are doing and you develop habits and procedures out of what you’re doing.”

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

37. “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

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

— Jasper Johns

39. “Everybody 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

40. “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

41. “I have meant what I have done. Or I have often meant what I have done. Or I have sometimes meant what I have done. Or I have tried to mean what I was doing.”

— Jasper Johns

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

— Jasper Johns

43. “Working is very important to me. Probably because as a child I was taught that work was good. I don’t believe it intellectually but I identify with that idea. So it’s probably just like a habit.”

— Jasper Johns

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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.”

— Jasper Johns

47. “There was very little art in my childhood.”

— Jasper Johns

48. “That’s what painting does; it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization.”

— Jasper Johns

49. “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

50. “I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.”

— Jasper Johns