… when you are willing to eliminate things that have been looking good all the time …
This is from Philip Guston & the Poets by Kosme de Barañano (2017):
… The painting does not describe or narrate; it happens, it is, like an algebraic formula, like a cocktail . Guston paints his visual cocktail just as the poet [Montale] indicates in the first four lines of the section titled Ossi di seppia:
Don’t ask us for the word to frame
our shapeless spirit on all sides,
and proclaim it in letters of fire to shine
like a lone crocus in a dusty field.
… As Guston told his friend the art critic Harold Rosenberg, “The only things you can really talk about in painting are impossible to talk about. I can only put it in the negative, but you can do a lot with negatives. The real difficulties begin when the hand refuses to do what the soul doesn’t want it to do.”
… [Guston] “As you work, you think and you do. In my way of working, I work to eliminate the distance or the time between my thinking and doing. Then there comes a point of existing for a long time in a negative state, when you are willing to eliminate things that have been looking good all the time; you have as a measure — and once you’ve experienced it, nothing less will satisfy you — that some other being or force is commanding you: only this shall you, can you, accept at this moment.”
… Guston makes his self-portraits into stones and his objects into ruins in the light of the setting sun.
My most recent previous post from Barañano’s book is here.
-Julie