Philip Guston Quotes

Philip Guston — American Artist born on July 27, 1913, died on June 07, 1980

Philip Guston, born Phillip Goldstein, was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the late 1960s Guston helped to lead a transition from abstract expressionism to neo-expressionism in painting, abandoning the so-called "pure abstraction" of abstract expressionism in favor of more cartoonish renderings of various personal symbols and objects... (wikipedia)

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

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 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.

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

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

Philip Guston Quotes

Login with