Philip Guston Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.”
-- Philip Guston -
“Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.”
-- Philip Guston -
“The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.”
-- Philip Guston -
“Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.”
-- Philip Guston -
“Studio Ghosts: When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.”
-- Philip Guston -
“There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.”
-- Philip Guston -
“Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.”
-- Philip Guston -
“Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe.”
-- Philip Guston -
“To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.”
-- Philip Guston -
“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.”
-- Philip Guston -
“I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.”
-- Philip Guston -
“I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.”
-- Philip Guston -
“When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.”
-- Philip Guston -
“We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.”
-- Philip Guston -
“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.”
-- Philip Guston -
“To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.”
-- Philip Guston -
“There are so many things in the world - in the cities - so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make.”
-- Philip Guston -
“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.”
-- Philip Guston -
“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.”
-- Philip Guston -
“I go to the studio everyday because one day I may go and the Angel will be there. What if I don't go and the Angel comes?”
-- Philip Guston -
“More than a process, painting is being possessed...”
-- Philip Guston -
“There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.”
-- Philip Guston -
“Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible.”
-- Philip Guston -
“In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?”
-- Philip Guston -
“No good to paint in the head - what happens is what happens when you put the paint down - you can only hope that you are alert - ready - to see. What joy it is for paint to become a thing - a being. Believe in this miracle - it is your only hope. To will this transformation is not possible. Only a slow maturation can prepare the hand and eye to become quicker than ever. Ideas about art don't matter. They collapse anyway in front of the painting.”
-- Philip Guston -
“Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.”
-- Philip Guston -
“I do not see why the loss of faith in the known image and symbol in our time should be celebrated as a freedom. It is a loss from which we suffer, and this pathos motivates modern painting and poetry at its heart.”
-- Philip Guston -
“You know, comments about style always seem strange to me - 'why do you work in this style, or in that style' - as if you had a choice in the matter... What you're doing is trying to stay alive and continue and not die.”
-- Philip Guston -
“If the artist starts evaluating himself, it’s an enormous block, isn’t it?”
-- Philip Guston -
“Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere.”
-- Philip Guston
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