Tag: Philip Guston

This painting was still wet when I dropped it off. I know that’s a risky thing to do, show something before the dust settles, but I wanted something that got away from the grid. Or grids. I’m showing a lot of them. Twenty new charcoal drawings, ten of the Bug Jar Mugshots, 12 of my 2008 oil on canvas “Models from Crime Page,” a double triptych of the 2004 “Models from Crime Page” (36″ x 24″ oils), six of the 2015 small oil on wood panel “Models from Crime Page,” and all six of the original 4″x4″ 1971 mugshots of my Bloomington friends. So this one at 4 feet by 5 feet, will position itself on one wall.

There’s other stuff there too. The place is huge. Original Crimestopper pages, scans of my sources on a monitor and the earliest mugshot painting I could find, one from 1996. I fretted for days about showing that one, thinking my new stuff is so much better. And then I came back down to earth. RoCo wanted an early piece to show show the scope of this project. I searched everywhere for one that was even earlier. A have a photograph of it but I must have thrown it away.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite Philip Guston quotes.

“There is the canvas, and there is you. There is also something else, a third thing. In the beginning’s dialog – between you and the surface. 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 have experienced it, nothing else will satisfy you – that some other thing or force is commanding you: only this shall you, can you, accept a this moment.”

The McKee Gallery in New York represented Philip Guston when he was alive, a rather brave stance at the time. Their current show celebrates the centennial of his birth.

From the press release:
As one of the great artists of the 20th Century who is as current and relevant today, it is hard to imagine that Guston would be 100 years old this year, underlining how revolutionary and prescient his art was. His figurative paintings blew open the caveats of 60s Color Field dogmas and did not embrace the irony of the Pop culture. Guston followed a solitary track: from doing a comic strip as a boy, to political realism, through Abstract Expressionism, he knew how to paint and what to paint—his form and content were matched. From autobiographical to universal subjects, Guston was a humanist, an existentialist, a free man who explored all avenues of his imagination and abilities to record the human condition.

Right on. Long live Philip Guston.

We made a point to visit the street pool today. That’s what it takes. We had only been down there once this summer. I brought my Guston book to read and finally put it down when I got to this line. “I’m not so involved with what the other guy does. You want to upset your own applecart.” Good thing I did or I’d be sunburnt.

Back in the late nineties when Margaret Explosion was was playing Friday Happy Hour at the Bug Jar Casey told about Southtown Beverage and we’ve been going there since. We only get out there a few times a year but it is always an enjoyable experience. It’s the only worthwhile establishment in Henrietta (suburb of Rochester with one of every chain restaurant or store in the world).

You drive through the building entering from the back. You open your trunk and someone takes your empties out. It helps if they’re in bags of twelve or the cases the bottles come in but they will take anything with a NY deposit. That goes for empty seltzer bottles from Wegmans and the 24 ounce Budweiser cans I find when we walk. They have have great prices on beer and “blow out’ specials on outdated beer. I picked up a case of Estrella, brewed and bottled in Barcelona with an expiration date of 5/11, for $16.99. You can stay in your car for this whole trip but I usually pull forward and park out front so I can walk back in and savor the experience with the two brothers who run the place.

“I don’t write. I put down my thoughts.” I love that quote from “Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations.” Guston quotes others pretty well too like Paul Valery. “A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.” This book covers the same ground that Fred Lipp does in our painting classes.

Addressing the whole:
“You paint the form without looking at the form but looking at the whole.”

Locating forms:
“The form is not just executed there. It must emerge from this background or environment.”

On visible erasures:
“Erasures represent erasures of notions and of good intentions.”

Starting over:
“To paint is to start over everytime.”

Frustration:
“Frustration is one of the great things in art. Satisfaction is nothing.”

Trouble:
“You have to have trouble and contradictions. It has to be complex because life is complex, emotions are complex.”

Imagery:
“Imagery is endless. The image thing and pursuing the image is endless. It changes you. That’s the most wonderful thing. It makes you shake. the other thing I want, and what I think an artist wants, is to be baffled all the time. Baffled, puzzled, new problems. Problem. A terrible word. I don’t mean problem. Baffled. To become dumb. Innocent – how?”

Creation:
“Real art makes you shake. Let’s not kid ourselves. Creation is force. It’s a power. It’s not a craft. It’s a power and a force and everybody has that force. If you don’t open yourself up to this power then get out.”

When you travel somewhere you experience that place intensely. You are stimulated by the new environment.

I’m reading this book on Philip Guston’s Roma paintings, paintings that I once thought slight, as if Guston could do slight and as if I am worthy to judge a Philip Guston. Guston got more sculptural in Italy in an direct, elementary way painting monuments and shaped shrubbery and looking at Morandi and the Italians.