Philip Guston Quotations

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 I really hate yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation.

It is possible to make a living thing, not a diagram of what I have been thinking: to posit with paint something living, something that changes each day.

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 the viewer? He is asked to 'see' the future links.

Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light.

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.

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 and spaces will appear... making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me toward painting - anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.

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 it... What counts is that the paint should really disappear, otherwise it's craft.

All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art - with their need and contempt for one another. Of necessity, to create is a temporary state and cannot be possessed...

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.

The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.