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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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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
Form
Arbitrary
Become
Intimate
Might
Strategy
Unacceptable
Must
However
Strategies
Something
Especially
Distortion
Way
Clear
Builds
Desire
Incomplete
Else
Removed
More quotes by Philip Guston
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
Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.
Philip Guston
Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.
Philip Guston
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
There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.
Philip Guston
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
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
Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.
Philip Guston
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
The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.
Philip Guston
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
I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.
Philip Guston
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
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
More than a process, painting is being possessed.
Philip Guston
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
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
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
We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.
Philip Guston
If the artist starts evaluating himself, it’s an enormous block, isn’t it?
Philip Guston
