Jasper Johns Quotes

Insight is the first condition of Art.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

The longer I look at something, the more my imagination churns and I can find somewhere to put it.

I think I'm painting a picture of two women but it may turn out to be a landscape.

Things shape themselves before my eyes just as a I draw them.

I'm not going to be like, "I gotta get this idea out of my head." It's like, "OK, here's a clean slate, and I've got all these paints, and all these brushes, and this is what I'm going to do with it." It reveals itself, and you take a step back and say, "What's happening here? Where are we going? What does this mean? Do I need to break it open? Does it need to just be what it is? Should it end now?"

You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.

It's true that I can write a song and not really be sure what the meaning of it is.

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see?

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

It is possible that scientists, poets, painters and writers are all members of the same family of people whose gift it is by nature to take those things which we call common-place and to 're-present' them to us - the world - in such ways that our self-imposed limitations are expanded.

The condition of photographing is maybe the condition of being on the brink of conversion to anything.

An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.

To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

Art is something you can't teach, but you can inspire it.

I get lost in my right brain, especially in creative things.

Some people would say my paintings show a future world and maybe they do, but I paint from reality. I put several things and ideas together, and perhaps, when I have finished, it could show the future.

To me, writing and composing are much more like painting, about colors and brushes; I don't use a computer when I write, and I don't use a piano. I'm at a desk writing, and it's very broad strokes and notes as colors on a palette.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'.

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