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We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

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
Vanish
Makers
Image
Artist
Work
Ridden

More quotes by 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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.
Philip Guston
Image
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
Image
There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.
Philip Guston
Image
There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.
Philip Guston
Image
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
Image
The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.
Philip Guston
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.
Philip Guston
Image
I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.
Philip Guston
Image
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
Image
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.
Philip Guston
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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