I Paint What I Want to See: Philip Guston (Penguin Modern Classics)

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It felt weird hearing him describe the speed he could churn them out although that’s also part of why I chose it for the project, lol. Guston is again someone you would like to invite for dinner and who would entertain and light up the evening with endless reflections and digressions about art. No criptic arty language but relatable and approachable writing about making a painting, this proves to me that's mostly art critics that makes art a difficult subject, for artist it all more simple. When asked about the subjects of these late paintings, he’s as confounded as anyone – ‘I don’t know what the hell it looks like’, he says, of a painting of a shoe – but that’s just what he loved about making them.

Ofcourse, with Guston you're better off getting the Collected Writings, but I love these little white penguin classics.If you love art, or if you are an artist, if you love Guston’s work or even if you don’t like it so much, you will enjoy this book. If his paintings are always saying ‘Yes, but…’ (to quote the title of Dore Ashton’s essential 1976 book about the artist), so too is Guston. If you are not really into art, perhaps you will enjoy it less, but I firmly believe that reading and, in this case, almost listening, to someone who discusses the subject he is the most passionate about can not fail to captivate the reader.

Dialogues were Guston’s chosen form of public speech, several of which, along with other published pieces and talks, are collected in this book, published to coincide with the opening of his rescheduled retrospective in May this year. The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science?The wealth of information on the creative process, metaphysics, philosophy, art, painting, and anything similar is honestly unreal. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Not a review—Guston’s writings and talks are wonderful—but a note to alert the interested reader to the fact that everything in I Paint What I Want to See can be found in Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations, published by the University of California Press in 2010 (this latter book also includes additional material, the editor’s selection of accompanying images, and an Introduction by Dore Ashton).

His foregrounding of doubt – about what he was painting, which often shifted in the making, or what his own work was about, or what motivated him to do it at all – was what infused his late paintings with the ability to generate new ideas in the heads and hands of others.During his lifetime he seemed an outsider, but now the world of painting seems to have regrouped around him. The editorial model adopted—allow someone else to do all the work, then conveniently “forget” the fact—no doubt helps to keep overheads low, but should we really be happy that the accountants have won again? Even the earliest talk included here, his interview with David Sylvester from 1960, which took place during Guston’s abstract phase, seems to tee up his later practice. This book captures the breadth and depth of his thinking, and also captures the feeling of an intensely lively era when artists like Cage, Feldman and Guston felt that making art was a branch of philosophy.