Studio Ghosts: When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out.

Philip Guston

Categorized in : Art Inspirational Teacher

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

Philip Guston

painting magic pieces

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

Philip Guston

frustration satisfaction art

You know, comments about style always seem strange to me - 'why do you work in this style, or in that style' - as if you had a choice in the matter... What you're doing is trying to stay alive and continue and not die.

Philip Guston

style choices trying

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

magic artist memories

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

imagination heart hands

We are image-makers and image-ridden... We work until we vanish.

Philip Guston

makers artist

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

air long fall

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

Philip Guston

serendipity mysterious want

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.

Philip Guston

magic mind moving

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.

Philip Guston

paint each-day thinking

I have a studio in the country - in the woods - but my paintings look more real to me than what is outdoors. You walk outside; the rocks are inert; even the clouds are inert. It makes me feel a little better. But I do have a faith that 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.

Philip Guston

nature real country

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

Philip Guston

painting excellence looks

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

Philip Guston

miracle peculiar needs

Then you learn about composition, you learn about old masters, you form certain ideas about structure. But the inhuman activity of trying to make some kind of jump or leap, where , the painting is always saying, 'What do you want from me? I can only be a painting.' You have to go from part to part, but you shouldn't see yourself go from part to part, that's the whole point.

Philip Guston

education trying ideas

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

Philip Guston

creativity morning night

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?

Philip Guston

want mean believe

To paint is always to start at the beginning again, yet being unable to avoid the familiar arguments about what you see yourself painting.

Philip Guston

begin-again argument painting

To will a new form is unacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire, too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else.

Philip Guston

arbitrary desire might

No good to paint in the head - what happens is what happens when you put the paint down - you can only hope that you are alert - ready - to see. What joy it is for paint to become a thing - a being. Believe in this miracle - it is your only hope. To will this transformation is not possible. Only a slow maturation can prepare the hand and eye to become quicker than ever. Ideas about art don't matter. They collapse anyway in front of the painting.

Philip Guston

eye believe art

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.

Philip Guston

painting hell process