Jasper Johns Quotes

Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

Painting is as close as a person can get to actually capturing the heat of the moment.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

I'm very representational some of the time, and a little all of the time. But when you're painting out of your unconscious, figures are bound to emerge.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

It's as if I were collaborating with myself, revealing my relationship to the material. My hand would make the drawing. Then my mouth would transmit it.

I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.

I come in. I'm going to sketch, I'm going to drape, I don't know what I'm going to do.

These guys are just flying through the air and I'm capturing them in the split second and putting it into a work of art, via clay to the bronze.

When you're drawing something, you kind of run a movie in your head. You might close your eyes or stare into the distance and kind of see a movie unfolding and, you know, grab a certain moment or think, 'Oh, yeah, that's when we need just the point that he appears around the corner but just as she's getting into the car,' you know?

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing's identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.

I have to take it as a given that I have got a certain ability to do something. I can be an artist, which is take something and transform it into another thing. I can just see something, and I can see my painting.

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke.

Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like.