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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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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
Paint
Painting
Seen
Lives
Never
Men
Like
Museum
Museums

More quotes by Philip Guston

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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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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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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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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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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
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We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.
Philip Guston
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More than a process, painting is being possessed.
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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If the artist starts evaluating himself, it’s an enormous block, isn’t it?
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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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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There's some mysterious process at work here, which I don't even want to understand.
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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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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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 seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.
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'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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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