Philip Guston Quotes

Born of the sensibility, art sows and creates life in its turn.

No art is sunk in the self, but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Creation is dominated by three absolutely different factors: First, nature, which works upon us by its laws; second, the artist, who creates a spiritual contact with nature and his materials; third, the medium of expression through which the artist translates his inner world.

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work.

One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

I look at a lot of artists. I'm inspired by - I suppose I shouldn't say 'inspired,' but it's not really influenced. I am inspired. Art comes from art.

I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Since the tubes of paint used by the artist are manufactured and ready-made products, we must conclude that all the paintings in the world are 'ready-mades aided' and also works of assemblage.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

In any great art, you create a world, and you invite people into that world, and hopefully, it's fleshed out enough and you've explained it well enough.

All artists draw from their lives, except they mask it and camouflage it... which is the smarter way to do it.

I think art, at its best, happens on a conscious and a subconscious level.

Being an artist, you soak up imagery, and you put it back out in whatever form you do your own imagery.

I like drawing from all kinds of territories in art.

I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it - if my work has anything it's that I'm taking this from this and that from that and mixing them together. If people don't like that, then tough titty, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal; they don't do homages.

I tend to get very suspicious of anything that thinks it's art while it's being created.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

The artist is called a creator.

Warhol influenced me because of his writing. If I had never read his writings and interviews, I would never have understood his work.

The collaboration which sometimes follows is seldom based on good will: usually on desire, rage, fear, pity or longing. The modern illusion concerning painting (which post-modernism has done nothing to correct) is that the artist is the creator. Rather he is a reciever. What seems like creaton is the act of giving form to what he has recieved.