24 March 2023
Guston
“Everyone destroys marvelous paintings. Five years ago you wiped out what you are about to start tomorrow. Where do you put form? It will move around, bellow out and shrink, and sometimes it winds up where it was in the first place. But at the end it feels different, and it had to make the voyage. I am a moralist and cannot accept what has not be paid for, or a form that has not been lived through. Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing.” Philip Guston
Disclaimer; I really like everything about Philip Guston. I always have, since I was a child when I saw his work long before I knew what to make of it. Naturally, it doesn’t mean that I love everything he created but I’ve loved his cultivated spirit, one which held the highest esteem for both Piero della Francesca and Paolo Uccello, just like me. I also love that he was a fellow American, who, like me, was fiercely connected to European Painting. It seems slightly ironic to me that most of the ‘American Expressionist’ painters were from Europe yet Philip was perhaps the least American but with more aesthetic roots in Europe. I love his willingness to abandon all his work that gave him a successful career in the early 1960’s by moving on from decorative Abstractions to re-embrace a figuration of his earlier self. His risked losing friendships and patrons because of it. He was the kind of American hero who for me cut his own path and he was never comfortable with a career built upon a status quo.
Though I am not as severe as him when he disparages satsifaction, I understand what he meant for himself and his own work. His extra large pictures from the 1970’s onward required of him a total commitment. I’ve read his letters and journals and my impression of him in his studio is of a gladiator in the ring surrounded by all his earthly demons. Hence, he scraped and clawed his way to the finish line in each of his pictures like his life depended upon it. But viewers would be mistaken to see his large abstract pictures as just battlefields of emotion for they were structured, and he was obsessed with pictorial unity and obediant to chiaroscuro. For me, he was the most accomplished painter aligned with the Abstract Expressionist School of New York, yet ironically he played an almost an invisble role in it.
But that said, let’s be honest, one cannot love everything that another artist, poet, writer, musician, creates during their career. It’s not even that he or she, has had a great booming career because when an artist loves another artist, it’s more like how one might love a partner, not only for their attributes but their blemishes too. It’s a holistic attraction, spiritual even, because when we love another, we invest our whole selves into that relationship. So, of course we accept faults that we may find in them like we would with our own children. All this is to express y why someone like me would never make a reliable art critic. Like a ruthles lawyer, I only seem to be hard on those whom I have no real attachment.
To be honest, I cannot think of any of my favorite artists whose work pleases me completely. Though really close, not even Van Gogh can do that. And who doesn’t love his work or find deep empathy in his person? Regarding him, there are a few paintings which I cannot bear to look at, but it has nothing to do with his work, just me. For instance, In elementary school, on a long wall near the entrance was hung a print of his famous boats offshore at St Marie de la Mer, but because of unfortunate memories only to do with that school, I cannot find any affection, critically or emotionally for this image even today. But there are a few others too of which I’ve seen way too many reproduced in posters and on table linen in shops around France. This is unfortunate because all this hype around him has tarnished for me some of his most iconic paintings. But like they say, once seen, they cannot be unseen. Even, that wonderful Starry Night in MOMA in New York leaves me ambivilant much to my own secret shame.
Guston, like Van Gogh, also suffered for his Painting, and I really love that about him. Recent art history is littered with too many success stories that elevates too much bad Painting I think. I’ll be discreet, just one; Pablo Picasso. Why? Because he made so much junk at the foot of such greatness. He was like a king who lived in the royal palace strewn with own garbage. Picasso was sadly an artist of such creative capicity that it somehow must have corrupted his thinking. Possessed with such large gifts he compromised his giant vision for just mere talent and commercial success. It’s hard for me to reconcile the author of a colossal work like Guernica with so many really comically awful portraits that were sprinkled throughout his career along side so many genuine pearls. Might Picasso have been someone plagued with this nonchalent satisfaction for unworthy work of which Philip Guston wrote?
So what about this small picture from four nights ago? It’s a strange image. I cannot figure out what to think of it. Worse still, I cannot tell if its worth anything or just nothing. What does please me is that it is so very strange, something so unusual for me, that I am really more curious about it than anything else. It had been an overcast afternoon when I arrived. Unhappy with that situation, I set up anyway to see what might happen when the sun went down behind me. I made a palette and watched and waited. Gradually, the clouds lifted off the horizon line and the last rays of the sun lit up the entire sky made of pink clouds. It was very uncommon and reminded me of cotton candy. I tried to make visual sense of it. Am I happy with it? No, but am I satisfied that I came out to make a go of it at least? Yes, indeed. It’s so rare that I regret coming out to the beach even if I fail.
I think like any creative person, conscious or sub-consciously, I glean everything that crosses my path like some underwater crab that forages the bottom of the ocean and filtering out everything unusable. And like the clever crab, in my personal life too, I’ve learned by trial and error about what is useful or what needs to be thrown out. What I’ve thought was great has too often been lousy and vice-versa. This has been true in every corner of my life from women to jobs, to people, places and all things. They say that the worst things that happen to you usually turn out to be the best, but it took me a long time to understand that or even to believe it due to me cautiou crab-like nature, As Philip Guston said in a quote from 1970’s: “A artist has to be flexible enough to get outside of their own obsessive convictions when it mirrors that of a mule.”
So in this strange picture, I had the insight to put it aside for a time and let it bake inside holding judgement before I` see what it’ll says to me in the future.
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