Jasper Johns Quotes

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

During the '70s I was interested in words and meaning as a way of making art.

If you judge everything by how photographically real it looks, then you're missing out on a lot of what art is about and what communication is. There are ambiguities in life, and that should be reflected in art, cinema, and storytelling, I think.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

Art is not there simply to be understood. ... It is more the sense of an indication or suggestion.

I don't know of any good work of art that doesn't have a mystery.

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear

What is natural does not have to be a representation of something. I'm now working on a thing that is a reconstruction of a starry sky, and yet I'm making it without a given from nature. Someone who says he uses a theme from nature can be right, but also someone who says he uses nothing at all.

You must put the essence of what you want to say into a painting. The rest is arbitrary. Chosen with discernment, but chosen, and choice involves elimination.

Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas need not be made physical.

Life may as properly be called an art as any other.

The general ideas which are expressed in sketches, correspond very well to the art often used in poetry... every reader making out the detail according to his own particular imagination... but a painter, when he represents Eve on canvas, is obliged to give a determined form, and his own idea of beauty distinctly expressed.

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work

I was interested in ideas, not merely visual products. I wanted to put painting once again at the service of the mind.

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.

Every man has a different idea of what's beautiful, and it's best to take the gesture, the shadow of the branch, and let the mind create the tree.

I love art. It is uplifting.

Painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist of the representation of real and existing things. It is a completely physical language, the words of which consist of all visible objects. An object which is abstract, not visible, non-existent, is not within the realm of painting.

The painting is finished when the idea has disappeared.