Philip Guston > Quotes

“I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“Oh, how I hate the calculation, the reasoning of the eye and mind. I hate the composing — the designing of spaces — to make things fit! What, after all, does it satisfy? It robs and steals from the image that the spirit so desperately desires.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“Pictures should tell stories. It is what makes me want to paint. To see, in a painting, what one has always wanted to see, but hasn’t, until now. For the first time.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“And if you ask me: how do I know? I can’t answer that. [...] You just feel it, and take your chances right there.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“I’m always excited by the thin line which divides the image from the nonimage.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“It’s funny. You do it and you think, ‘Well, I’ll do some more.’ But you can’t. It only works once. You can only do anything once.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“As modern artists, that’s our fate: constant change.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“Well, I’ll take away mystery and enigma. That comes later. You don’t start with that. What you start with is a kind of itch, a desire, a strong desire to see what you imagine, or preimagine.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“I began to feel that I could really learn, investigate, by losing a lot of what I knew.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“He has a way of seeing which always more than fascinates me. I mean, it really involves me, how he sees.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“We are suspended between the order we see and an apprehension that everything may again move. And yet not. It is an extreme point of the impossibility of painting. Or its possibility. Its frustration. Its continuity.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“For some reason it seemed to me that I got a stronger feeling of that paint as material from looking at a painted image rather than a less defined one.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“The most powerful instinct is to paint a single form in its continuity, which is, after all, what a face is.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“But it came, as my images always come, very rapidly, and that rapidity has to do with the image and what it is as you’re doing it. Which has to do with when you stop, because you stop the moment you recognize it.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“I think creation is something like that. It’s not imagination and it’s not freedom and it’s not spontaneity. I think it’s a more human experience than that. I mean it can be tragic; it can be joyful; it’s compounded of so many elements and increasingly I almost think I don’t want to analyze it any more, think about it.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“It’s an immediate thing, a crucial moment. It’s somehow a feeling of all your forces, all your feelings, somehow come together and it’s got to be unloaded right then. […] There is no next day.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“I seem to tend to buy books of drawings. Because, of course, you see the most intimate thought, all his reflections, his erasures, the direct impulse.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“The thing you did then at that moment, that was it. So that the painting or the drawing was in fact evidence, you might say, or a document or a record really, [...] of the creative moment.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“Would you be as interested in seeing men fly, unattached and free, as you would be in seeing a man with, I don’t know, two hundred pounds of cement strapped onto him and let’s see him get two inches off the ground?”
― Philip Guston

“It fascinates me, destroying my images. I remember them just as well, sometimes more, than what stays.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“I did know that I wanted to feel the whole field, the whole rectangle, the whole area, the world.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“[I treat] the act of painting very much as a process of interaction between you and the paint and the surface in front of you. A give-and-take, I mean to say, between feeling an urge for grey, an urge for red, just a blind urge, and putting it on. And then not knowing whether it’s right, or not even caring about whether it’s right.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“That’s a quality of the act of painting, to get something down. Everything that’s in the sense of that phrase. To make it stay there. To stop it, in a sense. [...] Maybe that’s part of the original impulse for making a mark at all. To have a part of yourself, an act of yourself, be on the world.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“I’ll tell you what it is. What bores me is to see an illustration of my thought. [...] I want to make something I never saw before and be changed by it. So that I go in the studio and I see these things up and I think, Jesus, did I do that? What a strange thing. And I like to feel strange. It’s a personality thing. I like to feel strange to myself.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“And this seems to be the whole act of art anyway, to nail it down for a minute but not kill it.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“In art you always work between opposites. Between stopping and going, stasis and movement, abstraction and figuration.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“And I don’t believe in historical progress. That is to say, I wouldn’t agree with the theory that art advances, that Giotto did this because he couldn’t do the other. […] I don’t think that’s the way it works. I think that each artist is himself.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“Now, these are dangerous waters. Because actually I hope sometime to get to the point where I’ll have the courage to paint my face. But it is very confusing because sometimes I think that’s really what I am doing, in a more total way.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“It seems that hell is always more exciting than heaven, for painters anyway.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See

“Anybody would rather look at life than art.”
― Philip Guston, I Paint What I Want to See