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

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No reader could finish the book with a sense of Guston as a painter with a singular and unwavering vision of his work and its place in the world. 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? Touching on work from across his career as well as that of his fellow artists and Renaissance heroes, this selection of his writings, talks and interviews draws together some of his most incisive reflections on iconography and abstraction, metaphysics and mysticism, and, above all, the nature of painting and drawing.

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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.Usually I don’t mind reading things like this even if I’m not familiar with the artist but I genuinely felt like I was retaining zero information from this. And I suppose in the Collected Writings there's a lot of repetition and this smaller Penguin edition has the important stuff; the interview with Rosenberg, and the Studio Notes. His repeated (and perhaps willed) endorsement of ‘frustration’ as a crucial artistic ingredient in the mid-1960s gives way, by the end of the decade, to an outpouring of large-scale paintings he repeatedly admitted to being baffled by.

Remember that when Guston had his first 'stumble-bum' exhibition there was lots of exciting figurative painting and image-making happening. 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. 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. Whether the Guston myth (that he was quite so singular and in opposition to the art of his times) is entirely true, he definitely seems super-relevant to today.

Got about halfway before losing interest due to it feeling repetitive caused by it being a collection of his interviews and talks. Guston, one of the most influential and provocative American artists of the 20th century, had turned his back on the hip New York scene. Whereas the UCal book was a labor of love, some years in the making—the cassette and reel-to-reel recordings were transcribed, and the book edited, by Guston’s close friend, the poet Clark Coolidge—one suspects that I Paint was whipped up in a matter of minutes. His declaration that ‘I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration’ is borne out in the works he was making at the time, many of which have matter-of-fact titles ( Table, Vessel, Branch, all 1960) that are worlds away from the highfalutin sublimity of those of his New York School peers. Ofcourse, with Guston you're better off getting the Collected Writings, but I love these little white penguin classics.