Jasper Johns Quotes

I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed. They are fragments of endless possibilities.

Art is embedded in nature and they who can extract it, have it.

I once taught art to adults in a night course. I had a woman who painted her back yard, and she said it was the first time she had ever really looked at it. I think everyone sees beauty. Art is a way to respond

All I did was to look at what the universe showed me, to let my brush bear witness to it.

There is creation in the eye.

Organized perception is what art is all about.

Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.

Art is born in attention.

Sight is a faculty; seeing is an art.

A lot of painters listen to music, I think, while they paint. But I hate to do that. It's a horror. I can't really listen to the music. I'm not really concentrating on it, and I'm not really concentrating on the painting.

The big artist keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.

It's a question of trying to take down by dictation what's already there. I'm not making something, I'm trying to hear it.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.

You know, you become an artist, you become an observer, of life, and you digest life by making art about it.

Nature is a dictionary; one draws words from it.

I think, as human beings, we all have a fundamental mode, a basic way of relating to the rest of reality, and for me, it's always instinctively been about sound making and trying to extract information, grammar, meaning from sound making. That's been my way of navigating reality that's very personal; a painter might say they make marks or look.

The most pleasurable thing in the world, for me, is to see something and then translate how I see it.

Great art is not instant. It comes from experience, it comes from a place within. If you're trying to generate material, then you're going to generate stuff. It's not going to be great, it's just going to be stuff.

An artist's business is only to see.

Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear in our lives.

O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art.

I'm very interested in the question of how we perceive something, how consciousness goes from one thing, like looking at you in your black hat to what it might mean to my imagination and how I would draw that or write that, how I would subjectify you? It's something that is endlessly interesting to me.