Philip Guston Quotes

The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human.

Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create.

I've been a printmaker and designed objects. I've done 500 posters.

I don't think that writers or painters or filmmakers function because they have something they particularly want to say. They have something that they feel. And they like the art form; they like words, or the smell of paint, or celluloid and photographic images and working with actors. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was.

I've always sort of marveled at our ability to chat and match, because of, I come, honestly I think of myself of as a little bit of hack, and think like that, and I think of her [Mia Michaels] as an artist.

You're only kidding yourself if you put creativity before craft.

I make films that are very personal, and I always have. It's kind of the only thing that I think I have to offer as a filmmaker: the intimacy I've had with experience in a particular world, so the film comes from things I've seen and things I've felt. It gets transformed by the process. I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.

I want to draw and study a few things closely by feeling, not thinking.

Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.

There is something about the creative process... which is that you can't talk about it. You try to think of anecdotes about it, and you try to explain, but you're never really saying what happened... it's a sort of happy accident.

What has made it work, or what makes certain paintings successful or not, has to do with my being a painter and a thinking, feeling person, more than my sex, color, height, origin.

As an actress, I think I really understand that stage where you think you are picking reality in order to feed the fiction, but it happens to be the contrary. It's the fiction that suddenly feeds your reality. And you don't know how it has been done. That's the kind of magical transposition that is art.

I'm the expert when it comes to my paintings. I think all great painters have to have that confidence in what they are seeking and when they're getting there.

Craft is a trick you make up to let you write the poem.

When I was thirteen or fourteen I bought a paintbox with oil paints from money slowly saved up. The feeling I had at the time - or better - the experience of color coming slowly out of the tube - is with me to this day.

Try to distill the character of your subject. Understand how he moves, thinks, acts. It's difficult to put into words. Consider each drawing as a problem that did not exist before, and then try to solve that problem to the best of your ability. That i what caricature is all about

The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

Art stands on the shoulders of craft, which means that to get to the art, you must master the craft.

If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think.

A work of art is not a matter of thinking beautiful thoughts or experiencing tender emotions , but of intelligence, skill, taste, proportion, knowledge, discipline and industry; especially discipline.

Art, at any rate in a novel, must be indissolubly linked with craft.

...imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic.

With practice the craft will come almost of itself, in spite of you and all the more easitly if you think of something besides technique.

I find that the quest to be perfect and make perfect music is like a black whole. I realize that you can come with the intention to capture a vibe and use a formula, but you have to accept that most of the time its not going to be what you envisioned and you might manifest something better. I think that's been the hardest thing to wrap my head around that most ideas we go for ends up sounding different. I think art in general should be about enjoying the process and the experience. All that matters is if you feel the music and it captures the element your going for.

Whatever you feel or think your exact state at the exact moment of your brush touching the canvas is in some way registered in that stroke.