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.
Jasper JohnsRead
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
Interpretation
True artistry requires total commitment and the abandonment of ego.
Jasper Johns emphasizes that to truly create art, one must surrender their attachments and preconceptions, especially the desire for validation or recognition as a 'good' artist. This suggests that the essence of art lies in the purity of expression rather than striving for external approval, highlighting the deep personal sacrifice involved in the creative process.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a workshop on artistic expression to encourage participants to embrace their authenticity.
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.
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. And I very much wanted to be somewhere else.
This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.
One wants one's work to be the world, but of course it's never the world. The work is in the world; it never contains the whole thing.
Sometime during the mid-50s I said, 'I am an artist.' Before that, for many years, I had said, 'I'm going to be an artist.' Then I went through a change of mind and a change of heart. What made 'going to be an artist' into 'being an artist', was, in part, a spiritual change.
Make something, a kind of object, which as it changes or falls apart (dies as it were) or increases in its parts (grows as it were) offers no clue as to what its state or form or nature was at any previous time. Physical and Metaphysical. Obstinacy. Could this be a useful object?
Movies absorb our attention more completely, I think.
I’m just a storyteller, and the cinema happens to be my medium. I like it because it recreates life in movement, enlarges it, enhances it, distills it. For me, it’s far closer to the miraculous creation of life than, say, a painting or music or even literature. It’s not just an art form; it’s actually a new form of life, with its own rhythms, cadences, perspectives and transparencies. It’s my way of telling a story.
Imagination is the key to my lyrics. The rest is painted with a little science fiction.
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
I always find myself gravitating to the analogy of a maze. Think of film noir and if you picture the story as a maze, you don't want to be hanging above the maze watching the characters make the wrong choices because it's frustrating. You actually want to be in the maze with them, making the turns at their side, that keeps it more exciting...I quite like to be in that maze.
A thing which is present can be invisible, hidden by what it shows
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