Quote

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.

Jasper Johns

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Jasper Johns
Age: 94
Born: 1930
Born: May 15
Artist
Costume Designer
Designer
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Painter
Photographer
Printmaker
Sculptor
Augusta
Georgia
Comes
Wouldn
Right
Coming
Mean
Grace
Kind
Sort
Sure
Energy
Means
Often
Holds

More quotes by Jasper Johns

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I have meant what I have done. Or I have often meant what I have done. Or I have sometimes meant what I have done. Or I have tried to mean what I was doing.
Jasper Johns
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One's range [of ideas] is limited by one's interests and imagination and by one's passion.
Jasper Johns
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I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.
Jasper Johns
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I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.
Jasper Johns
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I think through living one's life, one both changes and remains the same. One can see it either way, one can see oneself as being now what one was and one can see oneself as being absolutely different from what one was. It's a trick of thought.
Jasper Johns
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My experience with life is that it's very fragmented. In one place certain kinds of thing occur, and in another place a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication of those differences. I guess, in painting, it would amount to different kinds of space being represented in it.
Jasper Johns
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A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.
Jasper Johns
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Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
Jasper Johns
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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.
Jasper Johns
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Bend color names which should be made of neon or copper tubing. Place an object on a surface - trace the object - then bend the object - leaving some part of it attached.
Jasper Johns
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When you work you learn something about what you are doing and you develop habits and procedures out of what you're doing.
Jasper Johns
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To me, self-description is a calamity.
Jasper Johns
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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.
Jasper Johns
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Put a lot of paint & a wooden ball or other object on a board. Push to the other end of the board. Use this in a painting. - ruler on board.
Jasper Johns
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Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
Jasper Johns
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Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.
Jasper Johns
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Working is very important to me. Probably because as a child I was taught that work was good. I don’t believe it intellectually but I identify with that idea. So it’s probably just like a habit.
Jasper Johns
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I tend to like things that already exist.
Jasper Johns
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I love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.
Jasper Johns
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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.
Jasper Johns