Jasper Johns Quotes

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

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

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

A painting of a person can be descriptive, but for me it's about all the things that make up a picture - the feelings, the brushstrokes - more than describing somebody. People latch on to the personalities when they talk about my work and forget the other parts.

The point of painting is not really deception or imitation.

My aim in painting is to create pulsating, luminous, and open surfaces that emanate a mystic light, in accordance with my deepest insight into the experience of life and nature.

I always thought that one of the reasons why a painter likes especially to have other painters look at his or her work is the shared experience of having pushed paint around.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I feel that art is beyond language.

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.

As an artist, I want a reaction.

Is the Mona Lisa an 'accurate' representation of the actual human model for the painting? Who knows? Who cares? It's a great piece of art. It moves us. It makes us wonder, makes us gape - finally makes us look inward at ourselves.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

I'm very interested in the language of photography in relationship to painting.

Drawing is giving a performance; an artist is an actor who is not limited by the body, only by his ability and, perhaps, experience.

The final test of a painting, theirs, mine, any other, is: does the painter's emotions come across?

I like to feel that all my best photographs had strong personal visions and that a photograph that doesn't have a personal vision or doesn't communicate emotion fails.

Painting is a coalescing of experience.

Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

I believe that the great painters with their intellect as master have attempted to force this unwilling medium of paint and canvas into a record of their emotions.

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour.