#guston

The art books I have, of the masters, are mostly drawings. 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. It’s not paint. We all know that with paint you put down a pink, a red, a blue, a shape, and you scumble it over, you change it. There’s a lot of funny business going on in painting. But drawing is direct.

I’ll tell you what it is. What bores me is to see an illustration of my thought. That would bore me. 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. The whole world’s filled with things I know. But then, in working more with things, they don’t have nouns, they don’t have names, but they’re things. Things get squashed, are pushing each other, and all that. I like that feeling. Things dent each other, they affect each other. So, when do I know I’m finished? It’s when the drawing isn’t padded. That is, it’s not repaired or tickled. And where the line is alive. Where the line is making the form at the moment of the doing of it. I enjoy the feeling of the thing being caught at a very special certain moment. “At a split-second moment the thing is caught, like it just came into existence. And it’s about to change into something else, by the way. It’s about to metamorphose into something else. I enjoy that. I don’t like waxworks, for instance. You know, convictions about what I like. One could give a talk called ‘What I Love and What I Hate’. Generalizations are terrible in art.”

Certain artists do something and a new emotion is brought into the world; its real meaning lies outside of history and the chains of causality. Human consciousness moves, but it is not a leap; it is one inch. One inch is a small jump, but that jump is everything. You go way out and then you have to come back – to see if you can move that inch.

There are twenty crucial minutes in the evolution of each of my paintings. The closer I get to that time – those twenty minutes – the more intensely subjective I become – but the more objective, too. Your eye gets sharper; you become continuously more and more critical. There is no measure I can hold on to except this scant half hour of making.

Trump May Demolish Buildings With Murals by Philip Guston and Ben Shahn

Trenton Doyle Hancock Confronts Philip Guston

Philip Guston Painting Sparks Dialogue in a Local Museum