Quotes from Philip Guston

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

In my experience a painting is not made with colors and paint at all. I don't know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint?

The visible world, I think, is abstract and mysterious enough.

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.

I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

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. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.

I should like to paint like an man who has never seen a painting, but this man -myself - lives in a museum.

I am a night painter, so when I come into the studio the next morning the delirium is over.

Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 true or not? Is that what I mean, is that what I want?

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

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.

There is something mysterious in this work that I do not ever what to discover.

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

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 it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible.

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