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There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.

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
Meaning
Painting
Idea
May
Ideas
Exists

More quotes by 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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I would tend to say that I do what I do as well as possible and that most people don't.
Jasper Johns
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I am not strong on perfection.
Jasper Johns
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Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
Jasper Johns
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I tend to like things that already exist.
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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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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Generally, I am opposed to painting which is concerned with conceptions of simplicity. Everything looks busy to me.
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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That’s what painting does it organizes vision in a certain way or suggests that certain things be paid attention to and certain other things not be paid attention to. It functions in that way to a certain extent in our civilization.
Jasper Johns
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I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.
Jasper Johns
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Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
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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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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I’m interested in things which suggest the world rather than express the personality... The most conventional thing, the most ordinary - it seems to me that those things can be dealt with without having to judge them they seem to me to exist as clear facts, not involving aesthetic hierarchy.
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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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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To me, self-description is a calamity.
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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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