Best Philip Guston Quotes
- Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some… Activity
- The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish. What sympathy is demanded of… Asked
- Where do you put a form? It will move all around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the… Accept
- Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. Impossibility
- 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… Hell
- The things I felt... about certain painters of the past that... inspired me, like Cezanne and Manet... that complete losing of oneself in the work… Act
- Usually I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time. On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms… Actuality
- There comes a point when the paint doesn't feel like paint. I don't know why. Some mysterious thing happens. I think you have all experienced… All
- I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You… Been
- All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art - with their need and contempt for one another. Of necessity, to… All
- Do I really believe that? I make a mark, a few strokes, I argue with myself, not do I like or not, but is it… Argue
- 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… Canvas
- The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance. Art
- I feel more as if I'm shaping something with my hands. I feel as if I've always wanted to get to that state. Like a… Always Wanted
- 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… Arbitrary
- Studio Ghosts: When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history,… Critics
- 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… Artist
- What is seen and called the picture is what remains - an evidence. Even as one travels in painting toward a state of 'unfreedom' where… Appear
- 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
- Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realize… Concretely
- 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,… Anywhere