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"[Painting is..] a kind of war between the moment and the pull of memory.(quote in 1959)"
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Philip Guston..there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something — Philip Guston
"..there comes a point when something catches on the canvas, something grips on the canvas. I don’t know what it is, you can put your paint on the surface? Most of the time it looks like paint, and who the hell wants paint on a surface? But there does come a time – you take it off, put it on, goes over here, moves over a foot, as you go closer you start moving in inches not feet, half-inches – there comes a point when the paint doesnt feel like paint. I dont know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced it.. ..What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise its craft. Thats 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."
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Philip Guston
Philip Guston
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Philip Guston was a Canadian and American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. "Guston worked in a number of artistic modes, from Renaissance-inspired figuration to formally accomplished abstraction," and is now regarded as one of the "most important, powerful, and influential American painters of the last 100 years". He frequently depicted racism, antisemitism, fascism and American identi
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"Sylvester: What about figuration in a more literal sense?"
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Philip GustonQuote
"So when the 1960s came along I was feeling split, schizophrenic. The war, what was happening to America, the brutality of the world. What kind of man am I, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everything—and then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue."
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Philip GustonQuote
"What I really want to do, it seems, is to paint a single form in the middle of a canvas. ..Thats all a painter is, an image maker, is he not? And one would be a fool, some kind of fool, to want to paint a picture. The most powerful instinct is to paint a single form in its continuity, which is after all what a face is. This happens constantly on a picture. I remember last year I became so nervous about what I was doing that I finally reduce it down to the can on the palette with brushes in it. Well, thats real, tat can with brushes. And I painted the an with brushes sticking in it, and I couldnt tolerate it. I couldnt face it. It was as if it didnt contain enough of my thoughts or feelings about it.. ..I became signs. Exactly.. ..It seemed to become signs and symbols and I dont like signs."
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Philip GustonQuote
"I got sick and tired of all that Purity! Wanted to tell stories.. [Gustons quote in 1967, referring to his swift from Abstract expressionism to figurative painting]"
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Philip GustonQuote
"Actually, one of the real problems that always bothers me [in creating a painting] is sustaining a feeling. I mean, when I look at Poussin now, well, I think thats the most incredible thing to maintain the feeling for a year, however long it took Poussin, Im telling you, to paint this vast structure. Bur perhaps that is not given to us now. I dont know... .Actually all all modern art puzzles me. I dont understand it. II really dont. I dont know whether it is fragmentary [as David Sylvester the interviewer suggested]. I have a sickening nostalgia for this other state of sustaining a feeling for months, being able to construct and build a picture. Well Mondrian, I think, did that, of course. He was almost one of the last artists to do that. I wish I could get there."
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Philip Guston