Philip Guston Quotes

My painting does not come from the easel.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

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

Painting on the ground was a cool challenge because you can't just stand back and see what you're doing.

... a canvas that I have covered is worth more than a blank canvas. My pretensions go no further; that is my right to paint, my reason for painting.

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

At it's essence, art is an alchemical process. Alchemy is a process of transformation.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

Each painting, I feel like I kind of might have gotten something. If I feel like I totally got it, there's probably something wrong and it's not finished. And if I really feel like I understand it then I'm done with these paintings and I'll have to do something else.

My paintings are only the ashes of my art

Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art.

Indeed, an engineer designing a structure is not unlike an artist painting one. Both start with nothing but talent, experience, and inspiration. The fresh piece of paper on the drawing board is as blank as the newly stretched piece of canvas.

I use printers to make prints of the images that I am creating. And I try to have that surface kind of replicated in the painting.

I paint daily with watercolors on 5-by-7-inch pads that are small enough for me to take them everywhere.

I start a picture and I finish it.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

I'm very interested to see how this new painting will go - I know I want it big and stark, and as I said, I follow the muse, and that's when it always works perfectly for me.

At each moment, a poem might grow into a totally different shape. It is not so much like working in a garden. It is more as if you remade the garden every day.

A face in the picture would bother me, so I'd rub it out with the turpentine and do it over.

I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.

I often avoid using the terms 'figuration' and 'abstraction' because I've always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting - you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.

The only thing in life that really gives me any peace is just being lost in the process of creating something, whether it's the film or painting and drawing, which has been a big part of my life, for a long time.

If you are a writer or any kind of artist, if you change something as fundamental as where you live - the way you live - then I think you change the very instrument that is trying to make the art.

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

Well, painting is the one thing I do, that is just me. It's me and easels, and the pencils. And as long as I don't drool too much over the canvas, the colors come out pretty good. And it's a chance to express all that I've got inside, that I sometimes keep hidden. And I think that's why I paint big broad, wide open landscapes.