Quote

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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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
Trying
Artist
Intentions
Going
Tell
Increasing
Life
Others
Boredom
Cannot
Intention
Rembrandt
Past
Complete
Announce
Certain
Spending
Glance
Find
Follow
Glances
Many
Works
Plague

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
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More than a process, painting is being possessed.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.
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
Image
Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.
Philip Guston
Image
Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.
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
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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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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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