Jasper Johns

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

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

“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.”

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

“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'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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I tend to like things that already exist.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”