Jasper Johns

“I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings o...”

“There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn't aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest...”

“At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from...”

“Intention involves such a small fragment of our consciousness and of our mind and of our life.”

“My experience of life is that it's very fragmented; certain kinds of things happen, and in another place, a different kind of thing occurs. I would like my work to have some vivid indication...”

“Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither.”

“Everyone is of course free to interpret the work in his own way. I think seeing a picture is one thing and interpreting it is another.”

“I decided that if my work contained what I could identify as a likeness to other work, I would remove it.'”

“The only logical thing I can think of is that I knew there were such things as artists, and I knew there were none where I lived. So I knew that to be an artist you had to be somewhere else....”

“I don't know how to organise thoughts. I don't know how to have thoughts.”

“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.”

“To do a drawing for a painting most often means doing something very sketchy and schematic and then later making it polished.”

“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.”