Philip Guston Quotes

I have heard painters acknowledge, though in that acknowledgment no degradation of themselves was intended, that they could do better without nature than with her; or as they express themselves, 'that it only put them out.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

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

For all the years I'd spent talking about pictures, the truth was that I had no idea how to draw or what it felt like to do it. I would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn't produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

I'm a painter, that's where I started out, at four years old, that was my first love as far as expression. So, I'm not a painter in the sense of, "Please come see my paintings" but, I do understand the value of not looking over the artist's shoulder while the work is in progress.

As an artist, you want to play around with mediums and see if you can get the point across in different way.

The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible.

When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out.

My first artistic love was drawing and painting.

Preliminary drawings or sketches in oil or pastel often have an immediacy and emotional appeal far greater than the final canvas.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

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.

Making art is different for everyone.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

I couldn't go into the haphazard drawing or the paintings, the splashing of paint. I wanted to go back to a completely dry drawing, a dry conception of art.

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

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

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.

Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul, thus have I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.

I'd like to write the way Matisse paints.

From the age of six I wanted to be an artist. At that point I meant a painter, but it turned out what I really meant was I was someone who was very interested in watching the world and making copies of it.