Philip Guston Quotes

I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.

He slid out drawers from the cabinet and pulled cards from the drawers, one after another. 'Henry Kissinger: war!''' 'Ornette Coleman: music!' 'Che Guevara: war!' 'Jeff Bezos: money!' 'Philip Guston: art!' 'Mahatma Gandhi: war!' 'But he was a pacifist', I said. 'Right! War!

Oh, how I hate the calculation, the reasoning of the eye and mind. I hate the composing — the designing of spaces — to make things fit! What, after all, does it satisfy? It robs and steals from the image that the spirit so desperately desires.

Guston tacked toward celebrating the crap of life not for its own ironic sake, but as the ever-present still life that surrounds the embarrassingly, even tragically human. No Duchampian object is ever tragic. Many if not most of Guston's objects, even the most hilarious, are.

It’s an immediate thing, a crucial moment. It’s somehow a feeling of all your forces, all your feelings, somehow come together and it’s got to be unloaded right then. […] There is no next day.

I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself.

Now, these are dangerous waters. Because actually I hope sometime to get to the point where I’ll have the courage to paint my face. But it is very confusing because sometimes I think that’s really what I am doing, in a more total way.

As modern artists, that’s our fate: constant change.

I began to feel that I could really learn, investigate, by losing a lot of what I knew.

Pictures should tell stories. It is what makes me want to paint. To see, in a painting, what one has always wanted to see, but hasn’t, until now. For the first time.

I think creation is something like that. It’s not imagination and it’s not freedom and it’s not spontaneity. I think it’s a more human experience than that. I mean it can be tragic; it can be joyful; it’s compounded of so many elements and increasingly I almost think I don’t want to analyze it any more, think about it.

He has a way of seeing which always more than fascinates me. I mean, it really involves me, how he sees.

Anybody would rather look at life than art.

[I treat] the act of painting very much as a process of interaction between you and the paint and the surface in front of you. A give-and-take, I mean to say, between feeling an urge for grey, an urge for red, just a blind urge, and putting it on. And then not knowing whether it’s right, or not even caring about whether it’s right.

I did know that I wanted to feel the whole field, the whole rectangle, the whole area, the world.

That’s the world, that’s your world. Alive. I didn’t want to feel that I was just making marks on the surface.

I’ll tell you what it is. What bores me is to see an illustration of my thought. [...] I want to make something I never saw before and be changed by it. So that I go in the studio and I see these things up and I think, Jesus, did I do that? What a strange thing. And I like to feel strange. It’s a personality thing. I like to feel strange to myself.

And I don’t believe in historical progress. That is to say, I wouldn’t agree with the theory that art advances, that Giotto did this because he couldn’t do the other. […] I don’t think that’s the way it works. I think that each artist is himself.

It was also a discovery that there was no such thing as accident. […] Sometimes I’d start drawing and, you know, the mind is quicker than the hand, and I don’t like that. I want the hand to be, if not ahead of the mind, at least simultaneous. And so the impulse is to go to the right with the full pen of ink? I would go to the left. And then something would happen, like a sensation of a mistake, so I would follow the mistake. But then, when you’re through, there’s an image that you’ve always wanted to see but you didn’t know it.

In art you always work between opposites. Between stopping and going, stasis and movement, abstraction and figuration.

But it came, as my images always come, very rapidly, and that rapidity has to do with the image and what it is as you’re doing it. Which has to do with when you stop, because you stop the moment you recognize it.

It seems that hell is always more exciting than heaven, for painters anyway.

But I love the shadows, for themselves alone.

The most powerful instinct is to paint a single form in its continuity, which is, after all, what a face is.

The thing you did then at that moment, that was it. So that the painting or the drawing was in fact evidence, you might say, or a document or a record really, [...] of the creative moment.

Well, I’ll take away mystery and enigma. That comes later. You don’t start with that. What you start with is a kind of itch, a desire, a strong desire to see what you imagine, or preimagine.

I seem to tend to buy books of drawings. Because, of course, you see the most intimate thought, all his reflections, his erasures, the direct impulse.

It’s funny. You do it and you think, ‘Well, I’ll do some more.’ But you can’t. It only works once. You can only do anything once.

It fascinates me, destroying my images. I remember them just as well, sometimes more, than what stays.

We are suspended between the order we see and an apprehension that everything may again move. And yet not. It is an extreme point of the impossibility of painting. Or its possibility. Its frustration. Its continuity.

And this seems to be the whole act of art anyway, to nail it down for a minute but not kill it.

I felt torn, you might say, between conflicting loyalties. […] The loyalty to my own past, and the other loyalty of what you might still do. Or what you might still become.

For some reason it seemed to me that I got a stronger feeling of that paint as material from looking at a painted image rather than a less defined one.

I’m always excited by the thin line which divides the image from the nonimage.

That’s a quality of the act of painting, to get something down. Everything that’s in the sense of that phrase. To make it stay there. To stop it, in a sense. [...] Maybe that’s part of the original impulse for making a mark at all. To have a part of yourself, an act of yourself, be on the world.

And if you ask me: how do I know? I can’t answer that. [...] You just feel it, and take your chances right there.

There’s a real world I’m painting, that I’m imagining, and it exists. All I have to do is reveal it.

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