Quote

It's simple, you just take something and do something to it, and then do something else to it. Keep doing this, and pretty soon you've got something.

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
Take
Something
Soon
Pretty
Simple
Keep
Else

More quotes by 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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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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Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.
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 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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One likes to think that one anticipates changes in the spaces we inhabit, and our ideas about space.
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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To me, self-description is a calamity.
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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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
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I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.
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 tend to like things that already exist.
Jasper Johns
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I'm especially interested in the music of John Cage... I would like to do some experimenting with the relationship between his freeform sound and free-form art.
Jasper Johns
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I feel that works of art are an opportunity for people to construct meaning, so I don't usually tell what they mean. It conveys to people that they have to participate.
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’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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Art is either a complaint or appeasement.
Jasper Johns
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Whatever I do seems artificial and false, to me.
Jasper Johns