Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations

Philip Guston in conversation with Harold Rosenberg, 1974

God knows where you start and how you start. Every painter and writer knows there are private strategies, as Cocteau calls them, “professional secrets”. Sometimes in painting I keep making “mistakes”, then I realize that what’s happening is that I keep scraping out the mistake because its not meeting certain expectations that I have developed from the last painting, and then I reach a point where I follow the mistake. I mean, the hand wants to go to the left instead of the right. So at a certain point I become willing to follow and see where going to the left leads, and it leads to all sorts of detours, fascinating detours.

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Harold Rosenberg: You want to be a victim of mysterious forces? You want to choose or not to choose?....You want to be a victim?

Philip Guston: Yes, very much. In fact, its very difficult to become one. You really have to prepare for that state. Oh, yes.

It fascinates me, destroying my images. I remember them just as well, sometimes more, than what stays. They no longer exist, but they exist in my mind. So I remember them. Their as concrete as the pictures that remain.

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HR: The pictures that remain are related to one another, but would you say that about the ones you’ve destroyed? You could say that, if you had a record of those non-paintings, they could have a similar relation to one another.

PG: I can be very specific. Some of the images I’m painting now I painted and destroyed ten, fifteen years ago, yes. Absolutely. I don’t have a photographic record, but I just know that that is true. So it’s a question of time: being ready, you might say, to accept.

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Yes, their really very recent, these recumbent figures. Actually, I think of them as the painter in bed. One of them, the one with the French fries, is called Painting, Smoking, Eating. Paint cans on his chest, imagining a painting above him. Thinking now about them, they are mostly about painting. They’re paintings about the painter. In the paintings of 1968-70 I also made the hoods into painters. There were pictures where the hoods became artists. My favorite group, the ones I keep, that I find I take out and look at, enjoy the most, are where they are painters. I took one down the other day to show someone who hadn’t seen the work, and I found the first picture I pulled out was where the hooded figure is painting another hood. I also had them discussing art, become art critics. I had one looking at an abstract painting.

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