Jasper Johns Way Quotations

What you might consider a bad work can be of extreme interest to an artist in ways which are not about its being a good or bad.

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.

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.

Everybody 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.

Cubism is an anatomical chart of a way of seeing external objects. But I want to confuse the meaning of the act of looking.

I often find that having an idea in my head prevents me from doing something else. Working is therefore a way of getting rid of an idea.

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

I am just trying to find a way to make pictures.

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.

I'm not looking for images, They just appear and take on an interest. Sometimes you look at a thing and it has no interest and then you see it in a different way and it has another meaning. Or something that was of no use will become useful.