Jasper Johns is circumspect when talking about his work. He has said it does not matter what art evokes “as long as it keeps your eyes and mind busy.”

You’ll come up with your own use for it. And at different times you’ll come up with different uses.

Johns thinks the meaning of art is a mood created between the viewer and the work. What inspired the work or what the artist thinks it may mean is of little interest—well, as far as Johns is concerned.

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.

Saying too much can undermine the mystery which makes his work so involving, while explanations can often sound banal.

One would like not to be led, avoid the idea of the puzzle which could be solved, remove the signs of thought, it is not thought that needs showing.

Yet the human need for narrative structure and resolution has created a weight of academic and critical texts that range from curious insight to indefensible bullshit.

Though Johns has said he does not want his work to be an exposure of his feelings, his most recent exhibition Regrets shown early this year at MOMA centered around the loss of friends (Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon) and lovers (Robert Rachensberg, Cy Twombly). The source for his series of paintings and prints was an old photograph of Freud seated on a bed (taken by John Deakin, commissioned by Bacon) which seemed to offer a fascinating glimpse into Johns’ feelings on the death of his friends and lovers.

In 1988, Jasper Johns represented America at the Venice Biennale where he presented a series of:

...difficult works, intense, even hermetic, loaded with personal symbols, involved with issues of mortality and fate, with which American modernist art after Abstract Expressionism has generally been uncomfortable.

He won the Grand Prize and was hailed as the heir to Rembrandt. In this documentary Johns Jasper: Ideas in Paint we follow Johns in preparation for the show, hear friends and fellow artists discuss his work, and are given a rare interview with the artist himself, where he remains quietly cautious.