“What I really want to do, it seems, is to paint a single form in the middle of a canvas... That's all a painter is, an image maker, is he not? And one would be a fool, some kind of fool, to want to paint a picture. The most powerful instinct is to paint a single form in its continuity, which is after all what a face is. This happens constantly on a picture. I remember last year I became so nervous about what I was doing that I finally reduce it down to the can on the palette with brushes in it. Well, that's real, tat can with brushes. And I painted the an with brushes sticking in it, and I couldn't tolerate it. I couldn't face it. It was as if it didn't contain enough of my thoughts or feelings about it.... I became signs. Exactly.... It seemed to become signs and symbols and I don't like signs.”

—  Phillip Guston

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), pp. 95

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Phillip Guston photo
Phillip Guston35
American artist 1913–1980

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“Idiots can do what I do. When I first started to do this [projecting photos on the canvas and painting them after having them traced in details with a piece of charcoal] in the 60's, people laughed. I clearly showed that I painted from photographs. It seemed so juvenile. The provocation was purely formal - that I was making paintings like photographs. Nobody asked about what was in the pictures. Nobody asked who my Aunt Marianne was. That didn't seem to be the point.”

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“I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen … that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.”

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Other

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Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

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Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 43, note 36 : quote on his start with photography

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