Philip Guston
Philip Guston
Philip Guston, born Phillip Goldstein, was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth27 June 1913
CountryUnited States of America
Philip Guston quotes about
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.
Look at any inspired painting. It's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.
Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.
There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.
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.
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.
To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else...
To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.
To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.
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?
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.
There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.
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.
More than a process, painting is being possessed...