Philip Guston: A Life Lived

Notes:

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Modern Painting- It was too easy to elicit a response, so much sympathy. Wanted specificity in work.

Appearances-Style-Survival-Circular

Dissolved & Figuration

State of Creation. Stay in that state! "The object isn't to make art, it's to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable,"

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Martial Memory

Contest btw the subject and the plastic form it will result in

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Walter Arensberg - Duchamp collected works for him. Brancusi, Klee, De Chirico. Dial Magazines

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Scottsboro Case - His mural was destroyed by KKK members in LA

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Ferderal Arts Project NYC — WAP — FAP

Painting changed constantly

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Truth- Not involved - Using subject as an excuse to make pictures. There’s nothing more unbearable and boring than making a picture, what one is looking for is an experience, movement, the unknown, chase that.

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C.R.E.T.A ROME

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1949-55 New York School

artists electrified each other

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I was reacting from being too imaginative & wanted everything to come from things.

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Euphoria was gone- destruction came

State of the world

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NYC is too social. Continuity is time for an artist. NY didn’t allow

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Attacked- Malborogh opening. 1968. How opinionated people are. John Cage hated the new work. Excommunicated. Bill de Kooning- “What do they think, where all on a baseball team!?”

It’s about freedom, it’s the only possession an artist has. It’s rough.

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The first thing always looks good, but then you start doubting it, you know.

If the artist starts evaluating himself, it’s an enormous block, isn’t it?

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On his paintings- Pessimistic. Doomed. Modern Condition. Autobiographical. Musa’s Stroke, Symbol, obsession, specific subject matter.

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Intuitive means being aware- Leah

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Everybody leaves the studio, and you wait to be alone, and ideally, you leave too. Third Hand. Vessel. Otherwise, it’s a wax museum. Unbearable.

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Energies, Nature, Space.

It has nothing to do with feet and shoes- Space, Breath.

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It was too much of a painting, I hadn’t experienced enough on it

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There is something deathlike about finishing a painting

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On Process- I don’t want to understand it like that-analytically

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If you stop, it’s a wax museum, it’s about the gas not running out. Don’t Stop. Don’t Stagnate. Michel ciclo.

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Same place as Goya, Manet, Cezanne went to, “Not Bad, Sonny”

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Boredom, Disgust, Anger, Anxiety. Line of work. How do they (the pictures) stay alive after? How do they not become wax? What kind of line of work is this?

I’m in the business of movement

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All the pictures to me are still open. Develop. Painting is both a friend & enemy. An enemy when you want to do it again. Painting is what I live for.

Sublime

Synaptic Stimuli

hilma af klint

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