Jasper Johns > Quotes

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

“I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.”
― Jasper Johns

“Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.”
― Jasper Johns

“Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.”
― Jasper Johns

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

“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 would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.”
― Jasper Johns

“Art is either a complaint or appeasement.”
― Jasper Johns

“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

“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.”
― Jasper Johns

“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.”
― Jasper Johns

“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 seemed like a losing battle. Finally one must simply drop the reserve.”
― Jasper Johns

“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

“All familiar things can open into strange worlds.”
― Jasper Johns