List of Philip Guston Quotes

I Feel More As If I'm Shaping Something With My Hands. I Feel As If I've Always Wanted To Get To That State. Like A Blind Man In A Dark Room Had Some Clay, What Would He Make? I End Up With 2 Or 3 Forms On A Canvas, But It Gets Very Physical For Me.

Sometimes I Scrape Off A Lot. You Have On The Floor, Like Cow Dung In The Field, This Big Glob Of Paint... And It's Just A Lot Of Inert Matter, Inert Paint. Then I Look Back At The Canvas, And It's Not Inert - It's Active, Moving And Living.

It Is The Bareness Of Drawing That I Like. The Act Of Drawing Is What Locates, Suggests, Discovers. At Times It Seems Enough To Draw, Without The Distractions Of Color And Mass. Yet It Is An Old Ambition To Make Drawing And Painting One.

All These Troubles Revolve Around The Irritable Mutual Dependence Of Life And Art - With Their Need And Contempt For One Another. Of Necessity, To Create Is A Temporary State And Cannot Be Possessed.

Painting Seems Like Impossibility, With Only A Sign Now And Then Of Its Own Light.

Many Works Of The Past Complete What They Announce They Are Going To Do, To Our Increasing Boredom. Certain Others Plague Me Because I Cannot Follow Their Intentions. I Can Tell At A Glance What Fabritius Is Doing, But I Am Spending My Life Trying To Find Out What Rembrandt Was Up To.

If The Artist Starts Evaluating Himself, It’s An Enormous Block, Isn’t It?

But You Begin To Feel As You Go On Working That Unless Painting Proves Its Right To Exist By Being Critical And Self-judging, It Has No Reason To Exist At All - Or Is Not Even Possible. The Canvas Is A Court Where The Artist Is Prosecutor, Defendant, Jury And Judge. Art Without A Trial Disappears At A Glance.

I Should Like To Paint Like An Man Who Has Never Seen A Painting, But This Man -myself - Lives In A Museum.

Usually I Draw In Relation To My Painting, What I Am Working On At The Time. On A Lucky Day A Surprising Balance Of Forms And Spaces Will Appear... Making Itself, The Image Taking Hold. This In Turn Moves Me Toward Painting - Anxious To Get To The Same Place, With The Actuality Of Paint And Light.

That's What I Mean By Something Grips In A Canvas. The Moment That Happens You Are Then Sucked Into The Whole Thing. Like Some Kind Of Rhythm.

The Canvas You Are Working On Modifies The Previous Ones In An Unending, Baffling Chain Which Never Seems To Finish. What Sympathy Is Demanded Of The Viewer? He Is Asked To 'see' The Future Links.