Phillip Guston: Work

Phillip Guston was American artist. Explore interesting quotes on work.
Phillip Guston: 70 quotes0 likes

“To answer your first question - most significantly the [ Federal Art Project ] project was my training ground in the real sense of the word. I feel very strongly about this. We were all poor, or most of us, and to have the time and opportunity to continue working - I was then in my twenties which is the important period - the crucial period for the young painter. This was most important and figures significantly in my own development. Although I feel that my personal image as a painter did not come about until I began my easel painting with personal imagery which was about 1941. The project kept me alive and working - it was my education.”

Phillip Guston

n.p.
1961 - 1980, Oral history interview with Philip Guston, 1965 January 29

“Lots of artists who paint have that experience to one degree or another, this release where their thinking doesn't precede their doing. The space is shortened between thinking and doing. It's a funny thing, what I really hate, yet I have to go through with it, is the preparation. You have to go through it, like somebody preparing for sacred vows, the sensation of you putting paint on, and it's so boring to put paint on and to see yourself putting paint on. You're really preparing for those few hours where some kind of umbilical cord is attached between you and it. You do it and the work is done and this cord seems to slacken, as if you left yourself there. And what a relief to leave yourself somewhere, to get out of it entirely.”

Phillip Guston

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 68

“While I was still on the WPA I was submitting designs for the Section of Fine Arts competitions which I did on my own time. Burgoyne Diller gave me a mural to do in the Community Building of the Queensbridge Housing Project on Long Island. I worked on the design and cartoons for about a year. Everything was approved and the walls prepared - casein tempera painted on the wall…. [It was] about 1938. Holger Cahill asked me through Diller to do the outdoor facade mural of the WPA Building at the World's Fair. 1 stopped work on the Queens mural and began working on the Fair mural which was finished on schedule in time for the opening of the Fair.”

Phillip Guston

n.p.
1961 - 1980, Oral history interview with Philip Guston, 1965 January 29

“But you begin to feel as you go on working that unless painting proves its right to exist by being critical and self-judging, it has no reason to exist at all - or is not even possible. The canvas is a court where the artist is prosecutor, defendant, jury and judge. Art without a trial disappears at a glance.”

Phillip Guston

1961 - 1980, ARTnews Annual', October 1966

“I went to New York in 1936 where I first worked as an assistant to Reginald Marsh as a non-relief artist since I had to await my residency requirement. This was the mural for the Customs House building in New York City. I didn't actually paint on this mural but Marsh asked me to design some lunettes between his panels. Next I went on the WPA mural division. I worked under Burgoyne Diller who was my supervisor, he was, I think, the supervisor of the New York City mural division.”

Phillip Guston

n.p.
1961 - 1980, Oral history interview with Philip Guston, 1965 January 29

“There are so many things to paint in the world – in the cities – so much to see. Does art need to represent this variety and contribute to its proliferation? Can art be that free? The difficulties begin when you understand what it is that the soul will not permit the hand to make. To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting. The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish.”

Phillip Guston

What sympathy is demanded of the viewer! He is asked to 'see' the future links
1961 - 1980, ARTnews Annual', October 1966

“There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art: That painting is autonomous, pure and for itself, and therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is 'impure'. It is the adjustment of 'impurities', which forces painting’s continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden. There are no 'wiggly or straight lines' or any other elements. You work until you vanish. The picture isn’t finished if they are seen.”

Phillip Guston

transcript of the panel, March 1960, held at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, as quoted in Abstract Expressionism Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York 1990, p.61
1950 - 1960

“[On the question: 'What was your main stylistic influence up to this time']: The Renaissance chiefly - Piero, Mantegna, Uccello - but I was attracted also by the modern idioms - Léger, Picasso - and was close to the abstract painters on the project such as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, etc. At the time I did the Queens project, there was already a marked change in my work - it was becoming more concerned with cubist concepts of treating space.”

Phillip Guston

n.p.
1961 - 1980, Oral history interview with Philip Guston, 1965 January 29

“What is seen and called the picture is what remains – an evidence. Even as one travels in painting towards a state of 'unfreedom' where only certain things can happen, unaccountably the unknown and free must appear. Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanished and the paint falls into positions that feel destined. The very matter of painting – its pigment and space – is so resistant to the will, so disinclined to assert its plane and remain still. Painting seems like impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. Which must be because of the narrow passage from a diagramming to that other state – corporeality. In this sense, to paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.”

Phillip Guston

12 Americans, by Dorothy C.Miller, New York, 1956. p. 36
1950 - 1960

“It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one. 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 and I feel the drawing making itself, the image taking hold. This in turn moves me towards painting -anxious to get to the same place, with the actuality of paint and light.”

Phillip Guston

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, pp. 73-75

“I mean that the things I felt and that I enjoyed about certain painters of the past that I liked, that inspired me, like Cézanne and Manet, that thing I enjoyed in their work, that complete losing of oneself in the work to such an extent that the work itself, even though it was a picture of a woman in front of a mirror or some dead fish on the table, the pictures of those men were no pictures to me. They felt as if a living organism was posited there on the canvas, on this surface. That's truly to me the act of creation.”

Phillip Guston

Source: 1961 - 1980, transcript of a public forum at Boston university', conducted by Joseph Ablow 1966, p. 66

“O’Hara was in his most non-stop way of talking, saying that the pictures put him in mind of Tiepolo [Spanish wall-painter, c. 1750]. Certain cupola frescoes. Suddenly I was working in an ancient building, a warehouse facing the Giudecca. The loft over the firehouse was transformed. It was filled with light reflected from the canal. [quote in 1955]”

Phillip Guston

Guston's quote; as cited in 'Ferguson', 1999, p. 18
1950 - 1960