The first use of the word "gray" in a work by Jasper Johns occurs in the oil painting False Start, in which it appears three times, surrounded by other words naming (but not labeling) colors. The words, which are not intended to match the colors but in some cases do, have been stenciled on the canvas. By embracing this self-conscious, painterly mode of application and simultaneously setting color at odds with language, False Start dismantles the expressive use of gesture and color and creates discordance between what one perceives and reads.

Immediately following False Start Johns made a closely related painting in black, white, and gray titled Jubilee. Superficially, Jubilee is simply a grisaille copy of False Start. But the more sedate Jubilee is not merely a version of the former; it is an elaboration on its theme. If False Start succeeds in divorcing gesture, color, and emotionalism, Jubilee underscores the differences between thinking in color and thinking without color. For Johns, the refusal of color is its own affirmative category.

In these canvases, the artist used gray to establish uniformity between flat surfaces and dimensional objects, whether real or implied, using everyday items such as a stretched canvas, a drawer, a ball, a newspaper, and a coat hanger. With their restrained facture and emphasis on commonplace subjects, these works offered an alternative to the visual and critical rhetoric of Abstract Expressionism, the dominant mode of painting in the 1950s. The choice of gray advanced the cause of literalism (the exploration of paint and canvas themselves as objects) most explicitly because it avoided the distraction of emotion suggested by color. "I used gray encaustic to avoid the color situation," he stated. "The encaustic paintings were done in gray because to me this suggested a different kind of literal quality that was unmoved and unmovable by coloration and thus avoided all of the emotional and dramatic quality of color."

Johns's engagement with gray in sculpture relates directly to the materials he used. Sculp-metal, a suspension of aluminum powder in vinyl and resin, appealed to Johns because of its versatility. It could be left as a matte gray or polished to shine like aluminum; it could be modeled to create three-dimensional forms or thinly applied over preexisting objects. In other cases, Johns "grayed" objects or materials that are not naturally that color. A good example occurs in Light Bulb (1960), an edition of four sculptures cast in bronze: Johns painted one gray and kept it for himself.

The map of the United States proved a logical succession to the flags and targets that had become Johns's signature images. The artist's engagement with the map motif began in 1960, when he was given a small, printed version of it. Johns covered the diagram with thick, contoured strokes of gray encaustic, obscuring many of the recognizable demarcations and thereby testing the image's legibility as a map. In later articulations of the motif, including the monumental gray Map (1962), the state borders are more clearly defined, and the names of states are labeled with stenciled lettering.

Johns produced numbers in four distinct arrangements: sequentially in groups (numbers); isolated on their own (figures); within a framework of 10 units (0–9); or superimposed over one another, as in 0 through 9 (1961). These motifs were articulated in a variety of media—encaustic, acrylic, Sculp-metal, aluminum, lithograph—in well over 100 works produced from the mid-1950s through the late 1960s. Johns's first lithographic motif, in fact, was a large "0," which would become the basis for the 0–9 editions begun in 1960 and completed in 1963. Three distinct versions of the motif were executed—in black, gray, and color.

Much of the work of this period is gray. Johns himself acknowledged the attendant changes in his art. In 1970, while arranging a chronological listing of his works, he commented, "the mood changes," when he got to 1961. Importantly, this was the year Johns's influential working relationship with the artist Robert Rauschenberg dissolved. But the limited associations of gray with such moods, while valid up to a point, have resulted in an oversimplification of the meaning of Johns's use of the color. An understanding of the fullness and importance of gray in his art before and well after the early 1960s is essential; the flurry of gray pictures during the Edisto years is therefore less anomalous and not exclusively dependent on biographical readings. To be sure, "the mood changes," if selectively. There are gray pictures that correspond to, or seem intended to evoke, feelings of anger and sadness; at the same time, there are others that evince levity.

Since Jubilee (1959) the words red, yellow, and blue have often been submerged under layers of gray paint. This is most explicit in the  painting Periscope (Hart Crane) (1963), in which the obliteration of color approaches a form of elegy. In this painting, color comes undone, suggested by the occasional backward and upside-down application of stenciled letters that name but do not represent colors. Johns thinly applied black and gray paint across the surface, most likely with a cloth, allowing the washes to run and drip down the canvas and fall between the superimposed letters. The painting is an homage to the suicidal leap and drowning of American poet Hart Crane. Johns drew inspiration from a passage in the "Cape Hatteras" section of Crane's epic 1930 poem, The Bridge:

The captured fume of space foams in our ears—
What whisperings of far watches on the main
Relapsing into silence, while time clears
Our lenses, lifts a focus, resurrects
A periscope to glimpse what joys or pains
Our eyes can share or answer—the deflects
Us, shunting into a labyrinth submersed
Where each sees only his dim past reversed.

In 1980, a full eight years after his first use of the crosshatch motif, Johns received a postcard reproduction of Edvard Munch's Between the Clock and the Bed (1940–42; Munch Museum, Oslo). In this late self-portrait, Munch, near death, depicted himself in his bedroom, standing in front of the open door to his studio; the bright red and dark blue pattern of the bedspread is rendered in a fashion markedly similar to Johns's crosshatches. Between 1980 and 1982, Johns, inspired by the Munch work, made several drawings and two large paintings based on the crosshatch motif. These works culminate in Johns's monumental grisaille encaustic painting Between the Clock and the Bed. This picture is the last major independent articulation of the crosshatch (as of this writing). Johns incorporated touches of red, blue, yellow, green, ocher, pink, and purple, but the painting is predominantly gray. For whatever reasons, Johns chose to end his extended treatment of the crosshatch motif with this distillation in gray.

In a series of four paintings collectively known as the Seasons, Johns assembled artifacts and seasonal symbols to represent epochs of his life. Winter is the only work in this series that is predominantly gray. In this picture, Johns's use of gray is determined and consuming. He uses gray to cover over and mingle with touches of red, yellow, and brown. Johns's shadow appears as a gray figure against the bricks on the right side. The obvious subject is climate and weather—specifically, snow. Notions of a fragile body are also appropriate with this theme. Chromatically, gray signifies old age.