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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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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
Painting
Pieces
Illusion
Piece
Magic

More quotes by Philip Guston

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Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.
Philip Guston
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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.
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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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
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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.
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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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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There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.
Philip Guston
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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
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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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I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.
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 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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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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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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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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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.
Philip Guston
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We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.
Philip Guston
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Lots of artists who paint have the experience to one degree or another... where their thinking doesn't precede their doing... It's a funny thing, what I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.
Philip Guston