I made the flags and targets to open men’s eyes. Jasper Johns
It all began with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets – things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I’ve always thought of a painting as a surface; painting it in one colour made this very clear ... A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator. Jasper Johns
My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterwards – by those who look for it. Two meanings have been ascribed to these American Flag paintings of mine. One position is: ‘He’s painted a flag so you don’t have to think of it as a flag but only as a painting’. The other is: ‘You are enabled by the way he has painted it to see it as a flag and not as a painting’. Actually both positions are implicit in the paintings, so you don't have to choose. Jasper Johns
Every artist feels alone and isolated, Friends are very important in terms of all sorts of definitions of oneself. They tell you what you are and what they are aside from the intellectual aspects. Jasper Johns
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist. Jasper Johns
My work is largely concerned with relations between seeing and knowing, seeing and saying, seeing and believing. Jasper Johns
David Hockney and Peter Blake, artists who came to represent British pop art. Janet Street-Porter, The Genius of British Art: Modern Times, Channel 4 2010
One man was determined to examine this onslaught of images, and his name was Richard Hamilton. In 1956 Hamilton joined forces with a maverick group of artists, architects and thinkers; together they formed the Independent Group. Dr James Fox, British Masters III: A New Jerusalem, BBC 2011
The Independent Group put on an exhibition, and they called it This is Tomorrow. ibid.
Sir Peter Blake: since his emergence in the early sixties as a key member of the burgeoning pop art movement, Peter has been one of the best known British artists of his generation, beginning with works such as On the Balcony & Self Portrait with Badges, as well as his numerous designs for album covers, Peter has combined various elements of popular culture with a particularly British sensibility. Tim Marlow Meets s2e1: Sir Peter Blake
And the most influential of all British visionaries was William Blake. An artistic, social and political radical who effectively created his own universe, which both offered a commentary on the problems of the overweening rationalism in the material world. It also offered a form of imaginative escape from it. Here, one of his complex creations The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy ... It’s a landscape from the depths of his own being. Tim Marlow on ... Watercolour
My version of pop art in the sixties came out of an interest in popular art. Peter Blake
Most artists go potty as they get older: dafter and madder as they get more celibate. So I am consciously going to do that. Peter Blake
Brian Sewell is a fool. For some years he seemed to have it in for me and Hockney and Kitaj. Even if he wasn’t writing about us he’d always find a way of bringing us in. He’d say, ‘So and so was a bad artist but not as bad as Hockney, Kitaj or Blake.’ Things like that. Peter Blake
His iconic design for the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band ensured he transcended the art world – his work took pride of place in the homes of millions of record-buyers.
Although it was one of his most famous pieces, he was paid just £200 for the sleeve, receiving no royalties from the album’s phenomenal success. BBC online 14th June 2002, ‘Blake: Leading light of pop art’
Blake was repulsed by the modern world of towns and cities. When reason and science was placed before beauty and imagination. Sir Roy Strong, The Genius of British Art, Channel 4 2010
It is not at all certain that a merely moral criticism of society may not be just as ‘revolutionary’ – and revolution, after all, means turning things upside down – as the politico-economic criticism which is fashionable at this moment. Blake was not a politician, but there is more understanding of the nature of capitalist society in a poem like ‘I wander through each charter’d street’ than in three-quarters of Socialist literature. George Orwell, Dickens