Jasper Johns

“Art is either a complaint or appeasement.”

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

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

“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.”

“I am not strong on perfection.”

“At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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