Jasper Johns Quotes
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To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.
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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 think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in.
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Merce is my favorite artist in any field.
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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.
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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.
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Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
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When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.
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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. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.
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I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.
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I'm working in my mind.
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Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
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One's range [of ideas] is limited by one's interests and imagination and by one's passion.
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That’s what painting does; it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization.
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A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.
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Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.
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I’m interested in things which suggest the world rather than express the personality... The most conventional thing, the most ordinary - it seems to me that those things can be dealt with without having to judge them; they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy.
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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.
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I think through living one's life, one both changes and remains the same. One can see it either way, one can see oneself as being now what one was and one can see oneself as being absolutely different from what one was. It's a trick of thought.
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I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.
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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.
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I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.
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One night I dreamed that I painted a large American flag, and the next morning I got up and I went out and bought the materials to begin it.
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I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.
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Most of the power of painting comes through the manipulation of space... but I don't understand that.
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It's simple, you just take something and do something to it, and then do something else to it. Keep doing this, and pretty soon you've got something.
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Working is very important to me. Probably because as a child I was taught that work was good. I don’t believe it intellectually but I identify with that idea. So it’s probably just like a habit.
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Generally, I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks busy to me.
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Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
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One works without thinking how to work.
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Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.
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