Zitat des Tages von Jasper Johns:
I don't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings.
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.
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.
I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.
To me, self-description is a calamity.
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 works without thinking how to work.
Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.
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.
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.
Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.
One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.
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.
I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.
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.
When something is new to us, we treat it as an experience. We feel that our senses are awake and clear. We are alive.
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.
To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.
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.
I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.
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.
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.
Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
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.
Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that.
I tend to like things that already exist.