What is seen and called the picture is what remains—an evidence.
Even as one travels in painting towards a state of “unfreedom” where only certain things can happen, unaccountably, the unknown and free must appear.
Usually I am on a work for a long stretch, until a moment arrives when the air of the arbitrary vanishes, and the paint falls into positions that feel destined.
The very matter of painting—its pigment and spaces—is so resistant to the will so disinclined to assert its plane and remain still.
Painting seems like an impossibility, with only a sign now and then of its own light. Which must be because of the narrow passage from a diagramming to that other state—a corporeality.
In this sense, to paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.
–Philip Guston, 1956
What an artist statement looked like before this current age of “academic” art training. It reads more like poetry than a thesis overview.