Art & Creativity Quote by Jasper Johns

Johns is admitting, with a kind of cool-eyed candor, that the clean story we like to tell about art - vision first, execution second - is a fantasy. Sometimes the image arrives like a sighting: he "sees it" and then paints it, the comforting myth of inspiration. Other times the hand goes first, and only afterward does the mind catch up: he paints it and then "sees it", discovering the work as a byproduct of procedure, accident, repetition. The jolt is that he treats both routes as "impure", and he refuses to romanticize either.

That word choice matters. In Johns's era, mid-century American painting was busy policing purity: Abstract Expressionism prized authenticity and the trace of the psyche; later formalists argued for medium-specific rigor. Johns, who made flags, targets, numbers - images already saturated with public meaning - lived in the contamination zone between seeing, knowing, and making. His work keeps asking: what counts as an original perception when the thing is already a symbol? What counts as intention when the paint itself makes decisions?

"I prefer neither" reads like a shrug, but it's really a method. By declining to privilege inspiration or process, Johns clears a space where meaning is not a private confession but a negotiated event between artist, material, and viewer. The subtext is almost ethical: any claim to purity - pure vision, pure spontaneity, pure concept - is a kind of lie. Johns's honesty is to stay inside the compromise and let the ambiguity do the work.