Creativity Quote by Jasper Johns

The line lands like a deadpan confession, but it’s really a provocation: Jasper Johns, the artist who made flags and targets feel newly strange, pretends to misplace the very instrument we expect artists to wield - “thought.” The double repetition (“I don’t know”) isn’t just insecurity; it’s strategy. The first clause admits a familiar problem (thoughts are messy). The second one pulls the rug out: it denies the whole premise that art begins as a neat, internal monologue.

Johns came of age when Abstract Expressionism sold genius as personality - the heroic painter vomiting soul onto canvas. Pop and Johns’ own work quietly broke that spell. His practice is all about choosing objects already saturated with meaning and letting process, doubt, and looking do the work. When he says he doesn’t know how to “have thoughts,” he’s resisting the culture’s demand for the artist’s explanatory voice: the tidy statement, the confident thesis, the “what it means” paragraph on the wall label.

The subtext is almost combative: thinking isn’t a prerequisite for making; it’s something that emerges through making. The quote also deflates the romantic myth of artistic clarity. Johns implies that consciousness is not a pristine command center but a set of frictions - between habit and attention, image and object, intention and accident. It’s an artist insisting that intelligence can be procedural, tactile, and delayed, arriving after the paint dries and the viewer starts doing their share of the work.