Quotes by Philip Guston

About Philip Guston:

Philip Guston 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.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

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

Philip Guston

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

Philip Guston

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

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

Philip Guston

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

Philip Guston

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

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?

Philip Guston

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

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

Author Bio

  • NamePhilip Guston
  • DescriptionAmerican artist
  • BornJune 27, 1913
  • DiedJune 7, 1980
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionPainter
  • WorksLate Afternoon
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; Rome Prize