Frustrated with painting but not wanting to be left behind, he said, “I wanted to change.” Art, he wrote, had become “too coded, too much talking.” He longed for a kind of painting that could vie with the graphic world for attention and communicate in straightforward visual terms, not just the latest artistic idioms and clicks. The young Jasper Johns talked about this moment of breaking through to making one’s own work. He said, “You do what is helpless and unavoidable.” Surrender to obsession, follow something to the nth degree. Johns was also interested in art that could communicate on its own terms, and said that paintings should be looked at “the same way you look at a radiator.”
Source: Mark Grotjahn’s Sign-Painting Breakthrough — Vulture