Philip Guston Quotes about Art

Philip Guston was a famous Canadian American abstract painter, muralist and printmaker who successfully transitioned from figurative, to abstract work and back again. He is best known for his large pink abstract impressionist paintings and his later cartoon styled figurative works. Famous Philip Guston artworks include “Zone”, “To Fellini”, “The Studio”, “Painting, Smoking, Eating”, “Bad Habits”, “Ancient Wall”, “The Street” and “To BWT”.

Mini biography: Born Phillip Goldstein on the 27th of June, 1913 in Montréal, Quebec, Canada. His mother was Rachel Ehrenlieb Goldstein and his father was Louis Goldstein. Guston married Musa McKim in 1937 and they had one child together: Musa Mayer. The artist died on the 7th of June, 1980 in Woodstock, New York, United States of America at the age of 66.

List of Famous Philip Guston Art Quotes

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing. Philip Guston

I was in Washington the other day and looked at that late self-portrait by Rembrandt. Honest to God, I didn’t know what I kept looking at. You know the more you think about these things, the less the thing appears as they are supposed to appear. In those great Rembrandt’s there is an ambiguity of paint being image and image being paint, which is very mysterious. Philip Guston

I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over. I come into the studio very fearfully, I creep in to see what happened the night before. And the feeling is one of, “My God, did I do that?”. Philip Guston

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see. 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, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere. Philip Guston

I maintain that the frustration is an important, almost crucial, ingredient. I think that the best painting involves frustration. The point about the late Rembrandt is not that it’s satisfying but on the contrary that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really, what he has done is to eliminate any plane – anything between that image and you. The Van Dyck hasn’t. It says I’m a painting. The Rembrandt says: I am not a painting, I am a real man. But he is not a real man either. What is it then, that you are looking at? Philip Guston

Look at any inspired painting. It’s like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation. Philip Guston

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. Philip Guston

There’s some mysterious process at work here, which I don’t even want to understand. Philip Guston

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. Philip Guston

Actually all all modern art puzzles me. I don’t understand it. I really don’t. Philip Guston

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. Philip Guston

Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It’s the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe. Philip Guston

Actually, one of the real problems that always bothers me is sustaining a feeling. I mean, when I look at Poussin now, well, I think that’s the most incredible thing to maintain the feeling for a year, however long it took Poussin, I’m telling you, to paint this vast structure. Bur perhaps that is not given to us now. I don’t know. Philip Guston

Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined. Philip Guston

I can’t find any freedom in abstract painting. I am just as stuck with locations, a few areas of color in relation to some kind of totality that I want, as I was before. And so the problem of figuration is somehow irrelevant to me. I think some of the best painting done in New York today is figuration, but it’s not recognized as such. Philip Guston

Philip Guston Self-Portrait Painting

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Related or similar popular artists and celebrities include: Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Ryman, and other Famous American Artists.