Quote

A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.

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
Ought
Look
Looks
Way
Radiator
Picture
Looked

More quotes by 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 love drawings, so I've always enjoyed making drawings that exist on their own.
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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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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There may or may not be an idea, and the meaning may just be that the painting exists.
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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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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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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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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To me, self-description is a calamity.
Jasper Johns
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A-not-complete-unit, or a new unit. The elements in the 3 parts should neither fit nor not fit together. One would like not to be led. Avoid the idea of a puzzle which could be solved. Remove the signs of thought. It is not thought which needs showing.
Jasper Johns
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I think a painting should include more experience than simply intended statement.
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 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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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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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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I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.
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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Old art offers just as good a criticism of new art as new art offers of old.
Jasper Johns