Jasper Johns Quotes

Good painting is the kind that looks like sculpture.

Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.

I made one untitled piece.

True Boogie-Woogie I conceive as homogeneous in intention with mine in painting: destruction of melody, which is the equivalent of destruction of natural appearance, and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means - dynamic rhythm.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

In every respect, fantasy is like doing abstract paintings.

Painting is so poetic, while sculpture is more logical and scientific and makes you worry about gravity.

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

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.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

My paintings are very strange - large and empty, like walls. Just the opposite of my writing, which is rich and juicy.

Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump.

White paint is my marble.

My painting is visible images which conceal nothing... they evoke mystery and indeed when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question 'What does that mean'? It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

A great painting is a great painting.

I love putting paint on canvas, getting lost in the process of painting.

I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'

I've tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with gray. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one color after another, and what has remained is gray, gray, gray!

Painting, I think it's like jazz.

I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings.