Philip Guston on Making a Mark

Making marks in a painting or drawing sets up a dialogue between artist and artwork, one that is full of questions, challenges and responses.

Sleeping by Philip Guston; 1977, Oil on canvas, 213.4 x 175.3 cm. Private collection © The Estate of Philip Guston

Philip Guston was a Montréal-born painter (1913) who became a major artist in the US.

I admire him for his honesty, making radical changes to his work over the years, going from skillfully figurative to purely non-objective (i.e. abstract) and then back to figuration; changes that had to be made in order to be true to the changes in himself as an artist.

The apparently crude approach he finally adopted (he said he wanted to paint like someone who could not paint) centred on a very personal vocabulary of recurring imagery and symbols.

​This quote from Guston shows his intimacy with and insight into the painting process.