Philip Guston Quotes About Painting
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I'm not interested in painting; I'm not interested in making a picture. Then what the hell am I interested in? I must be interested in this process.
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I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.
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Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.
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Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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More than a process, painting is being possessed.
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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?
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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.
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I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that it is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.
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To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.
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There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.
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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.
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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.
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Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.
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Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What is seen and called the picture is what remains - an evidence. Even as one travels in painting toward a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear.
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Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.
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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.
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