Quote

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

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Philip Guston
Age: 66 †
Born: 1913
Born: July 27
Died: 1980
Died: June 7
Drawer
Engraver
Illustrator
Lithographer
Muralist
Painter
Montreal
Quebec
Philip Goldstein
Phillip Goldstein
Phillip (birth name - used before 1935) Goldstein
Feels
Air
Vanishes
Work
Usually
Arrives
Long
Painting
Stretch
Position
Positions
Moment
Arbitrary
Fall
Destined
Moments
Falls
Feel
Paint

More quotes by Philip Guston

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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.
Philip Guston
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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.
Philip Guston
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Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.
Philip Guston
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I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.
Philip Guston
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More than a process, painting is being possessed.
Philip Guston
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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.
Philip Guston
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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.
Philip Guston
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We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.
Philip Guston
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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
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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.
Philip Guston
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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?
Philip Guston
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If the artist starts evaluating himself, it’s an enormous block, isn’t it?
Philip Guston
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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.
Philip Guston
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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.
Philip Guston
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The things I felt... about certain painters of the past that... inspired me, like Cezanne and Manet... that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself... felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface... That's truly... the act of creation.
Philip Guston
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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
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Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.
Philip Guston
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There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.
Philip Guston
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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
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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.
Philip Guston