Philip Guston: A Life Lived (1981)

[bunniefuu]

- [Philip] One always
quarrels with what one is.

I'm a modern painter, I suppose.

My quarrel with modern painting is that

I feel that much of modern painting,

in fact, perhaps some
of my early work too,

that it was too easy to
illicit a response, you know.

Painters could put down
some swatches of color,

and everybody responds, I
mean needs so much sympathy.

It has such a sympathetic audience.

I think I wanted more and
more specificity in the work.

There's too much of a love
affair in modern art, you know.

- I have a personal question

which I don't expect you to answer,

but I am fascinated wondering what

happened between 1962 and 1969,

particularly in 1964, '65.

- Same thing that happened in 1930.

What do you mean, to my painting?

- [Interviewer] Yeah.

- I think when I paint
this, or that, or that,

I'm still in 1940

or '50, or in the '50s, yeah.

I mean I don't know what I'm going to do.

I mean, many of these pictures have many

pictures underneath that
have been scraped out,

as the older ones do.

The appearance may change.

That's why the comments about
style sound strange to me.

You work in this style or in that style

as if you had a choice in the matter.

What you're doing is trying to stay alive

and continue and not die.

Therefore,

it's circular, you're still back there.

I don't feel any differently now

than I did in the early
'50s when I was doing

so-called non-figurative things.

I know that they're
dissolved and they don't

have this figuration and all that,

but that's really beside the point.

Because what is to the point is the...

that I'm in the same state.

- But altered slightly.
- But?

Yeah, but that's not my business.

- [Interviewer] Manifestations too.

- The rest is not my business.

All I want to do stay that state,

the rest is not my business.

- Well actually I've known
Philip's work for a long time.

Back when I was a student

at the Art Institute of
Chicago in the 1940's

I first saw paintings by Philip Guston

in the old Chicago annuals and

the American shows at that time.

That was before abstract expressionism,

just after World w*r II.

And so I was aware of Guston,

I wasn't aware of his
history or where he came from

or anything else but simply
by looking at paintings

like Martial Memory I felt that's

exactly the way I wanted to work,

because it was the advanced
painting of the time.

And then I was called into the service.

And when I was gone from 1952 to 1954,

it was during that period of
time that museums began to

pay a great deal of attention
to the new abstract painters,

to Pollock, to Kline, to
Guston, the whole bunch of 'em.

So when I came back to
school for my masters degree,

what had been the old Guston was gone

and what was the new Guston was there.

But his particular kind
of abstract expressionism,

or abstract impressionism,
whatever you want to call it,

the colors were so attractive,

the whole thing related in some
vague way to the late Monet,

and you could feel an
historical attachment.

I then, I would say in fairness,

I lost track again, as everyone did.

We got involved with the Jasper Johnses

and the Robert Rauschenbergs
and the Frank Stellas

and a few other of the early '60s artist.

But I wondered always what he was doing.

And when the Marlborough
show happen in 1970,

I think it was a shocker
for all of us in a way.

Not so much a shocker
for me because I knew,

consciously knew, his work
of the 1930s and the 1940s

where not dissimilar things appeared.

The young boys in cardboard
hats and newspaper hats

and fighting with wooden
swords weren't too far away

from the kind of rendering of
the new Ku Klux Klan painting.

The whole sense of them is so tough

and so strong at a time
when painting generally

appeared to have the signs at least

that it was getting burned
out one way or another.

To see one of the old-timers

come back with this kind of vigor

at that point in his
life was irresistible.

Though I admit that at
that time I did not know

that back in the 1930s he had been dealing

with the Ku Klux Klan in quite a different

way than at the Marlborough show.

I will admittedly say that as

the painting went on to the '70s,

the shock of the early
Marlborough paintings

was nothing compared to
what happened after that.

- They really are.

(laughing)

- Go ahead, Philip.

- Remy was saying that and
I didn't believe it was so.

Good to see you.
- Good to see you.

You look great.

(mumbling)

Put on a little weight.

- That was the food on the plane.

- Yeah, bologna. (laughs)

Isn't that nice?

- I haven't seen this in 25.

- [Henry] I know, so
did I, isn't that funny?

Memory does wonderful things.

- Well it hadn't been mounted.

This is the one show I can touch pictures

and nobody's gonna tell me nothing.

- But when you painted that picture

that was a very big picture

when you painted it.
- Yeah.

Gee, had that always been mounted?

- [Henry] They're in pretty good shape.

They're in pretty good shape, yeah.

They got the frame on
the Mother and Child.

- Yeah, the Mother and Child.

I was 17 years old.

I was studying the Renaissance painting,

as well as De Chirico and
the Picasso of the '20s.

Well, you have to come from somewhere.

You don't come out of the sky.

Holy Moses!

- You ready?

- Jesus!

- For the power base.

- Oh, here's the knockout.

- You're exactly right.

Like two different shows, Philip.

- [Philip] Yeah, this is a knockout.

- [Henry] Like two different shows.

- [Philip] It's overwhelming, Henry.

- [Henry] Yes, it is overwhelming.

- I don't know how much
more I can take of it.

Marvelous.

Are you happy?

- [Henry] Oh, I'm very happy.

- [Philip] How's Jan?

- [Henry] She's in great shape.

She's in great shape.

- What's been on my mind, you ask,

this last decade say, but
primarily the last five,

six years is the...

for me, the cruciality of a contest,

(stammering)

to me, every painter or artist has his

own temperament, of course,

and my temperament seems to need

or I'm not happy, not happy, not involved,

unless I have...

I call it a contest.

Contest between a subject

and the plastic form it will result in.

And the reason I enjoy the contest is

that this contest between
the means of painting,

I mean scale, distances,
locations, spaces.

- Surfaces.
- Surfaces,

color, that's right,
thin or thick and so on.

Leads, since I constantly
change on a single painting,

I mean scrape out and
repaint a lot as you know,

leads to structures which are surprising.

I was born in Montreal, Canada.

At a very early age

family moved to Los Angeles, California

where I was reared

until about the age of 18

when I left for New York.

The earliest contact with
an art school was about

I think the age of, perhaps 16 or 17.

An art school in California
where I'd won a scholarship,

but I couldn't afford
to stay in art school.

(stapler smacking)

I had to work for a living.

I worked at odd jobs at the time.

I'd drove trucks, I worked
in a cleaning plant,

doing all sorts of things,

and painted at night and weekends.

I started drawing and painting

when I was about 11 or 12.

Well in the west coast,
I mean in Los Angeles,

there was very little by way
of any excitement in art.

There were, they used to call it,

I think the Eucalyptus School of Painting,

landscape painters and so on.

It's not at all what it is today.

However, there was one
source of inspiration.

There was a doctor Walter Aaronsberg,

who had perhaps the only
collection of modern art there,

and it was a very good collection.

It was a collection that he commissioned

Marcel Duchamp to collect for him.

It was the first time I had
seen Picassos and Mir?s,

Brancusi, Klee, the whole school of Paris

modern movement was available
to me for the first time.

I was mostly struck by De Chirico.

They hit me very hard, in fact,

it was seeing these
paintings by De Chirico,

it's what made me to want to
be a painter, not resolve.

I thought as if I had come home.

A high school friend was Jackson Pollock

and my memory is of going
with Jack, he was Jack then,

to old secondhand book shops and fighting

each other to buy old Dial magazines.

There was like you'd find,
I suppose in any province,

a small group, sort of an underground

group of young painters and
politically interested people

and poets and writers and musicians.

This was a small rebellious group,

which we were interested
in all the advanced forms

of poetry and painting
then which would come to us

by way of magazines and reproductions,

never an original exhibition.

And we decided to do a group of frescoes

on the Scottsboro case, which
was a hot case at that time.

You remember the Scottsboro?

Nine black boys who were sentenced

for life for raping a white girl.

And it was all circumstantial evidence.

So we did a series of frescoes
on the Scottsboro case,

which was shown at the John Reed Club

which was in North Hollywood at that time.

The KKK, which was very
strong in LA at that time

had an immense membership.

And they just with lead pipes and g*ns

shot through the eyes of the black guy

being whipped by a clansmen.

I just thought I'd give you
the way it was then in LA.

About 1935 or '36 I went to New York.

I came to New York and
I saw those brick walls.

I felt as if I had come home.

I remember going to the
first artist union meeting

with 2,500 painters and sculptures.

I thought, this was incredible.

Pollock and his brother had gone

to New York the year before.

So I when I first arrived in New York

I lived with them in their
loft on eighth street.

And then gone on the federal
art projects in New York,

on the mural part of it.

It was, to follow up from
the Aaronsberg collection,

it was the first time I was exposed

to galleries and the museums in New York.

My painting kept changing,

constantly being influenced
by what I was seeing.

In one of the last murals I had painted,

a part of this mural which
was a section which depicted

some children, young children
fighting on the street

with ashcans and various pieces

of lumber and sticks and so on,

and some reason or another
this struck a chord in me.

For the next six years or so I painted

a number of easel paintings
of this subject, of children.

I remember destroying the
whole group of pictures

in the latter part of this period

because they didn't ring true to me,

and it was a sure sign to me
that I wasn't involved with it,

and I was using the subject
as an excuse to make pictures,

and nothing is more boring

in the world than to make pictures.

What you want is an
experience of making something

that you haven't seen before in that way.

I was studying Piero, obviously,

but when I reached the
bottom in working with this,

I had a year in which I
kept destroying paintings.

I've told this to Henry.

Because I didn't want
to paint the subject.

Actually I was getting
through with this subject.

- [Henry] Yeah, right.

- When I reached down here,
and I started to paint,

and suddenly I didn't feel
it, it wasn't real to me,

like If This Be Not I or Martial Memory.

So then I realized, well,

relationships have a different
meaning and that's why...

- [Henry] Look at that and this.

- And that came next,
but it was a year later.

And that's what happened.

I felt good about this.

It felt, well not that it was abstract,

but that it was moving to a place

I didn't know where I was
going and that's what I enjoy,

of not knowing where you're moving.

'Cause that's full of
potential, of course.

But you know those are
still the hooded figures.

So when I reached this point,

I went to Europe for the first time.

I was on a c.r.e.t.a. Rome.

I faked it.

I got a c.r.e.t.a. Rome by
submitting these pictures.

I just wanted to wander the streets alone

think about painting.

I knew I was headed for a change,

I didn't know where or what.

I didn't just stay in in Rome,

that's when I traveled all over and saw my

pantheon of painters for
the first time in the flesh,

I mean Piero, Masaccio, De Sanctis.

I drew out of the hotel rooms

and I did a lot of drawings like that.

And then I came back in
'49 and began painting

as if I were just beginning to paint.

From '49 for me up until say '55

was this very intense
active period in New York

of what's called the New York school.

Which I much prefer and I think many

of my contemporaries prefer that term

to the term abstract expressionist

because it simply defines a
place and a certain period

where a number of
artists, for many reasons,

were together at one time.

De Kooning, I knew on the WPA projects,

on the federal art projects.

Rothko and Motherwell,
I'd met at that time.

Barney Newman, we all
electrified each other.

I know what I ate that day,
you know the lunch I ate,

when the picture finally came off.

- [Woman] Is that true?

- Sure, and I can remember stories.

When this picture came off
in the old Cedar Bar days,

about three in the morning,
I was on 10th Street,

you know the artists' plot.

- [Woman] Yes.

- I go into Cedar bar and Bill Kooning's

at the bar with Franz Kline.

I'd been on it for, I don't
know, two or three weeks

and finally came off.

All the surround are just,

they're erasures of other forms.

I had this look on my face,

and Bill says, looks at me, he said,

"Good strokes, son.

"You made some good strokes."

(laughing)

So, I mean, I remember all these

little intimate details
about each picture.

It seems like every five or six
years or something like that

I begin feeling that
I've exhausted something

and gradually move into another thing.

Dissatisfaction entered
in to the work you've

done for the past five years.

Not that problems have to be solved,

because nothing is ever
solved in painting.

It's a continuous chain that sometimes

doesn't go in one line but
goes in a serpentine line

or in the crooked paths, detours,

which have to be investigated.

I felt like an explorer who almost

got to the top of Mount Everest

and somehow stopped just
short and remembered,

and thought 'Well, perhaps,
maybe I forgot some gear'.

'I forgot some equipment'.

But in going down to
recover this equipment

I took some side paths that looked

exciting and full of possibilities.

What equipment did I lack?

It was a stronger contact with

the thickness of things.

I suppose I was reacting
against being too imaginative

and wanted everything to come from things.

The graining of wood,
the feeling of stone,

the corruption of the world,
the violence in the world.

Nothing new at all.

I wanted it to be more like

the art of the past that I liked.

I mean a Mantegna painting
doesn't care if 500

spectators fall off a
cliff, you know it's there.

And so it goes.

In my loft, when I lived in New York,

and had this hundred foot grimy loft

full of crap and junk and so on,

over a firehouse, in Chelsea.

I hadn't painted for about two months.

Didn't feel like it.

My painting was beginning to bore me,

I mean what I'd been doing.

I stretched up a 10 foot canvas,

not on a stretcher, I painted on the wall,

on the partition wall.

And squeezed out tons of paint.

Oh, I'll paint the room.

I'll paint all this junk.

I had an eight hour stint.

I painted the cracked and broken mirror

and the paint table with paint
on the floor scraped out,

you know the oil, dirty,
you know, a New York loft.

Useless wires hanging down.

And other easels and stacked up drawing.

I painted like my eye, I
looked, I didn't think at all.

I painted the whole thing.

In fact I ended up
about eight, nine hours.

I look back and I thought,
well, Jesus, I'm a painter.

It looked like a Bonnard or, you
know... it was really wonderful,

a lot of colors and everything.

I was doing these black pictures then,

the beginnings of these
dark, heavy, black pictures.

We lived across the
street and I woke up Musa

about four in morning, I said,

you gotta look at this.

And of course she came over and she said,

"Gee, it's wonderful".

Then I couldn't sleep 'cause
I thought what's happening?

Am I going to have a
new career as a painter?

Is my painting changing?

Does this deny all my previous work?

You know?

To make the story short,

when I came in the next
morning to look at it,

my euphoria was gone, just disappeared.

The painting itself looked as
if I could just peel it off.

Didn't stick.

And naturally, I destroyed it.

This desire for more solid forms

continued all into the early '60s

with these more or less ambiguous images

but they were very solid,
these black pictures.

And more and more desire grew to make

them even more objective
and even recognizable.

After I had the exhibition
of this work in '66,

I started drawing a lot.

Such as the books on the table

or the clock hanging on the
wall, or my shoe on the floor.

It felt free somehow to make
it a recognizable object

painted as if I was seeing
the object for the first time.

Unconsciously as I look
back on my old work,

on this early work now,

it's as if I was preparing
the scenario, so to speak,

unconsciously, I didn't
know what I was doing.

But these fragmentary pictures

were all later incorporated
into the large work.

For instance, these are
very early drawings of books

that I did years ago.

Which I wanted to get the
thickness and solidity of the.

These led into, as you
can see in the back here,

some paintings of books,

some small paintings of books.

They kept changing their
forms as I worked into them.

They became stone tablets.

Something like this became

like some ancient manuscript
or something like that.

This is a recent one,
which I wanted to give

the feeling of an old, crumpled, book

that had been in existence
for thousands of years.

Then I began drawing,

this is a very early drawing.

I began drawing a subject which I

dealt with many years ago
of the hooded figures.

They're obviously...

based on Ku Klux Klan figures.

But I didn't mean to make a
story about the Ku Klux Klan.

I'm just using them as a, I
suppose you'd call it a symbol,

of hooded, masked figures.

- [Interviewer] I guess the
violence of those years.

- Oh, yes.

Oh, indeed.

You mean politically speaking here?

Very definitely had a big influence on me.

- [Interviewer] What in particular?

- Everything.

The w*r, the political conventions,

the state of the world, everything.

I don't think it's limited
just to America, either,

I mean the violence in the world
ever since I've been alive.

Which everyone experiences that.

I moved away from New York in '67.

Upstate, about 100 miles upstate.

My productivity increased.

In New York you gotta go to openings,

the social life, it's too much.

You know time I've learnt, is
not actual time for an artist,

it's continuity of time.

So if I can have months of just

nothing pulling on me,
nothing ahead or anything,

it's wonderful time because you continue

from you paint all night, and then sleep,

then you can paint.

You know what I mean, you continue.

In New York I couldn't.

I was on a crest of the wave when

that finally broke about '68.

My old interests came surging back.

I felt like Fellini.

I felt like a movie director.

I had to make memos to myself.

Have 'em around a table playing poker,

have 'em drinking beer, eating hamburgers,

you know some are riding cars.

I was attacked, you
know, that goes with it.

I'm used to it.

Like at the opening of
the Marlborough show

when I did those hoods there,

I mean the painters would come up to me,

I remember I don't have to name them,

and they'd say, "Phil, what did you have

"to go and do that for?"

Well you have no idea how
opinionated people are or.

Oh, the fine hatchet jobs were done on me.

It bothered me the, you know,

what's happened to this painter?

He was such a nice painter.

I mean John Cage said you were living

such a beautiful country.

He hated the new work, Cage did,

together with other people.

I mean some painters
that I'd known for years

wouldn't even talk to me,

like I had entered into a covenant

in a church, and I was
being excommunicated.

Bill Kooning put it a better way.

He said, "What do they think,
we're all on a baseball team?"

(laughing)

Bill said what's all this nattering

about figuration and politics.

He says it's about freedom!

So you know, embraced, kissed each other,

and said of course, the
first thing an artist,

his only possession is freedom finally.

That sounds easy, doesn't it?

But it's rough.

(scraping)

You know that story about
someone who knew a child

and had seen the child when he's an adult.

Says, my, how you've changed.

The child doesn't feel he's changed

in that 20 years or 15 years.

He's the subject.

I am the subject.

The first thing always looks good

and then you start doubting it, you know.

Very nice.

Fronts.

Here, this arched one is nice.

I used to draw these and
paint them years ago.

I used to put them in paintings,

as a background I'd put in those windows.

I love old brick buildings anyway,

particularly the river,
Hudson River buildings.

Well it hasn't changed at all
since the turn of the century.

I just like the looks of it.

Actually I also like the fact it's old

and that it's uninhabited.

I've done drawings of this.

Something about the fact
that it's not used anymore

fascinates me, in other words,

it's original intention has vanished

so that it exists now as a kind of object,

like a work of art, it
has no function whatsoever

and that fascinates me.

What do you like about
the building, Clark?

Those metal stars?

- Any metal attached to this brick

is kinda fascinating.
- Yeah, I know.

- [Clark] The rust.

I like the way things decay.

- [Philip] He's a poet.

He can say it better than I can.

Looks like a jail too.

- Yeah, it does.
- Oh, no, Philip.

- [Philip] No?

- [Woman] A jail wouldn't
have those nice eyebrows.

(laughing)

- [Philip] That's what they are.

Eyebrows with teeth.

- If you look at a lot of these

it's almost like a movie in a way.

- You mean the sequence?

- [Clark] Yeah, the way it is here.

I don't know how it would be singly.

- One of the hooded figures
all like he just dipped his,

the jam smeared all over him or something.

I like this one.

The back of the head like a real,

almost half vegetable, half root.

Huh?

- [Clark] Rock too.

- Half rock or root or
something like that.

I wanted like a really a
bunch of dumb creatures.

They're really dumb, just dumb creatures.

I mean the world we live in, you know?

(laughs) The real world.

Well somebody was here the other day who

had these kinda thoughts,
this wasn't as good as.

I really wanted to kick him out.

I thought, you really don't know...

You really don't know how it works.

That's just not the way the thing works.

- [Clark] You mean he came in
here and he looked at all this

and he said this isn't as good as?

- [Philip] That's right.

Or not as good as something
I painted last year or.

If the artist starts evaluating himself

it's an enormous block, isn't it?

- [Clark] Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

- [Interviewer] Do you think of yourself

as kind of pessimistic in attitude,

in terms of say the large
subject of your art?

I don't know if maybe that's
too large to talk about.

- I don't think it was pessimistic.

Think it's doomed. (laughs)

I don't mean I consciously
set out to paint doom.

- [Interviewer] Is that an aspect

of say the modern condition then?

- Yes.

Yes, I think so.

- [Interviewer] 'Cause
you feel you've lived it.

- I think so.

Then quite a number of paintings

in the last five, six years
are my impulse in doing them

were quite frankly, autobiographical.

I mean I was quite conscious.

Autobiographical in a
sense, to be very specific,

two or more years ago Musa,
my wife, had a minor stroke.

She was in the hospital for quite a while.

I became obsessed with her situation.

She became a kind of symbol,

just the top of her head,

her hair parting off to the horizon.

I'm quite aware that
what I'm doing there is

using specific, in that case
specific subject matter.

Look what Henry did.

Very nice.

He puts a Coats picture.

But you can gather them, the two together.

Then the Musa, as he calls 'em, pictures.

This one, that one, and this one.

Musa As Horsehoes.

- [Henry] And this one.

- And this one.

Sure!

It was you, then it became a horseshoe,

and then it became you again.

- [Henry] Then a sun and a wheel and a.

- That's right!

Was there ever a painter who

thought he could make a picture,

I'm not being vain, but I mean,

I was so amused in painting this.

It was gonna be another leg picture.

You can tell because I
painted out the repeated legs.

Then I put a door in and then
fanciful bugs parading below.

They're stamping bugs there.

Well that's a human

thing.
- Concern.

- We always stamp bugs out, right?

But it can become a painting.

So art can be anything, right?

- [Henry] Yeah, that's right, yes.

- [Interviewer] You talked
earlier of Musa's situation,

how did your own recent
illness affect your work?

- When I came home from the hospital

I wanted to paint a man dying because

that's what had happened to me,

I mean that was my own experience

with this heart attack.

But I was reading the Four
Quartets at the same time.

It's a late Eliot work and
I like the Four Quartets.

I was aware as I was doing it,

I didn't want to do a self-portrait,

too obvious and it wasn't
right for me to do that.

I certainly in the
middle of it became aware

this looked like Eliot,
and the reason for the ear,

which is extended like a Buddha ear

was because I just happened
to know that Eliott

became very interested in
his later years in buddhism.

I mean that's the reason for it.

- [Interviewer] And this is you at work?

- Well.
- More or less.

- [Philip] The artist, yeah.

- [Interviewer] The artist at work.

- [Philip] That's right.

And the big fat brushes that are.

- [Interviewer] His tools

in front of.
- His tools,

that's right pallette.

- [Interviewer] And a few
piles of paint, right?

- [Philip] That's right.

This is paint down here.

- [Interviewer] And the bugs.

- Yeah, it's a discovered picture,

I mean it's one of those pictures

that are found in the painting for me.

I don't know when I do a thing like that

I'm aware that it's some kind of bug.

I mean the impulses make
some kind of insect,

but I don't know what kind or.

I'm sure there isn't an insect

that's formed like that, I don't know.

Or I don't even know what that is exactly.

I know this is a stone,
I meant it to be a stone.

Once I moved into here,

I just naturally wanted to have some kind

of creature looking over.

It was fun to paint.

Huh?

- [Interviewer] You didn't
feel compelled to complete

the other side of the ravine there?

- No.

You mean this part?

Oh, no, that's open.

You gotta have that.

It's amazing the more picture
painted itself in this case.

But the more you're in it,

the more that simultaneity occurs.

(stammering)

I mean I'm very aware that while

the brushes are moving this way,

and I wanted this to move this way.

I mean there's this impulse that's...

I don't like the word spontaneous

but it is in a way, instincts,

that having things move
opposite directions

and up and down and so on.

I mean once the moon was
here it would look terrible.

It just felt wrong.

And then I put it there

at the very end, even cut off, felt right.

I think once I said something
to quote myself many years ago

I remember that, I was
talking to John Cage actually,

I said, when you go in the studio,

everybody is in the studio, your friends,

and art writers and the museum people,

they're all in the studio,
you're just there painting.

One by one they leave.

You see, that's what I told John.

One by one they leave
until you're really alone.

That's what painting is.

You wait and you prepare yourself

to be when there's nobody there,

and then ideally you leave.

- [Interviewer] I was just gonna ask you.

- Ideally you leave.

- [Interviewer] And then somebody

stays behind and does the painting.

- That's right.

A third hand does it, that's right.

But it's no different than...

I think Stravinsky said that

he didn't write Rites of Spring,

it wrote itself through him.

Well, that's not a "why" statement,

it's a realistic concrete statement.

In other words you feel
as if you're not through

until you feel as if you're a medium

through which this
rhythm is passed through.

Otherwise it's unbearable.

Otherwise it's wax museum.

I was thinking about, not legs,

I mean they're just the excuse.

Well I was thinking about,
actually when it came off,

I enjoyed the fact that
the top becomes like a top,

like a table top, a level.

I really enjoyed myself painting this.

With the openings, you
know where you open it,

where you jam it up.

I mean you're dealing with forces.

And suddenly these are
charging and this is dangling

like a pendulum, you know.

And here it's gathering
force like charging out.

The idea of, yeah,

of a completely separate organism,

an organism like you'd
find in life, in nature,

which has its own energy,

energies, diverse energies.

I like the fact that it's
happening in front of you

rather than, I think in that case,

it feels as if you had just come in

on something that's already happened.

It's already happened.

But this is in the midst of
happening, which excites me.

- It's got nothing to
do with feet and shoes.

- Nothing.

Nothing at all.

Am I glad you said that.

I've been hearing enough about it

from people who talk about feet and legs

and shoes and, ugh!

- What the painting is all about,

it seems to me is right here.

Don't you say?
- You're very savvy.

That's what Meyer Schapiro,
who's a close friend,

you know the artist?

When he saw this picture he said, Philip...

I said absolutely, Meyer.

Those little openings.

Otherwise, you couldn't breathe.

It would be unbearable.

When you said that's it, you bet.

When I started this
painting a few days ago,

it went alright, it was
almost finished in a day.

But I came in later that night and,

well, I liked the left part,
didn't like the right part.

So I started changing the right part.

Something happened which felt better

to me than the left part.

So then I changed the left part

and before I knew it, the
whole painting vanished.

The painting that was almost finished here

didn't look bad, it looked alright.

But it looked almost too good.

It's as if I hadn't
experienced anything with it.

It was too much of a painting.

I hadn't experienced enough on it.

I don't mean that I need
to struggle always with it.

I don't mean that exactly.

But it looked too pat,
if you know what I mean.

It looked too much like it felt to me

as if it were additions, this
and that and that and that.

Whereas what I'm always seeking is some

great simplicity where the
whole thing is just there

and can't be this and
that and that and that.

There's something deathlike
about a painting finished.

A kind of death happens and...

I then am inclined to destroy it.

Destruction of paintings is very

interesting to me and almost crucial.

Sometimes I find that what
I've destroyed five years ago

I'll paint now

as if when the thing first appears

you're not ready to accept it either.

There's some mysterious
process at work here

which I don't even want to understand.

I know that if I stop painting
and became a psychologist

of the process of making,

I would probably understand it more,

but it wouldn't do me any good.

I don't want to understand
it like that, analytically.

But I know that there's some working out

that takes place in time,

but it's not given to me to
completely understand it.

It's ill*gal.

One could argue that a
picture where you pause

and say well that's my conviction

at this time is a compromise,

'cause then you go on to future pauses.

That's when you stop.

That's when a pictures finished.

So in other words, all
your work is one picture.

But then it has to do with continuity,

I mean who's life, in
other words continuing.

Because if you stop, you're wax museum.

I mean if you say well that's it,

then that's the wax museum idea.

So I think it has to do with
the gas not running out,

or might have to do with fear of death.

I don't know.

Or you know, wanting to continue.

I realize in looking at the show,

Musa and I were talking
about it at the hotel

this morning 'cause we saw it yesterday,

that's why I said it's
not so much a painting,

well it's a painting
show, but it's a life.

It's like a life lived.

I'm curious about what
I'm going to do always.

I'm just curious.

And curious about failures.

Curious about non-failures,
or less failures.

I feel I've opened up a Pandora's box

of imagery and structures and so on.

I'm still dreaming about pictures

that want to paint and going to paint

and I do a lot of sketching.

It feels endless.

- 500 years from now
in the history of art,

if you could be remembered
for just one thing

what would you like it to be?

- What would I like it to be?

- [Interviewer] What
do you hope it will be?

- You mean as a painter?

- [Interviewer] In your work.

- I never thought of that but

I want to be in the same
place that Goya went to.

That Manet went to.

That Cezanne went to.

And I wouldn't mind a pat
on the back by them saying,

"Not bad, Sonny."

That's about all.
(laughing)

'Pas mal.'

(laughing)

The most you can do is try.

And I don't think it's courage
and all those nice words.

In fact one could make a
list of all the negative

things that would be more true to say

about being compelled
to continue painting.

They would include things
like boredom, disgust,

all the things you're not
supposed to think about.

It's not inspiration.

Inspiration is like for a minute but.

Anger, I mean lots of things that

you're not supposed to feel.

(laughing)

The best thing I can say about summing up.

I don't like that word summing up.

Summing.

Things are constantly opening up for me.

All these pictures to me are still open,

I mean they might develop.

You know, one thing is
true which will illustrate

perhaps a little more clearly
what I'm talking about,

is that when you've had to
your run in the painting

and you feel okay about it,

it's both your friend and enemy.

By enemy, I mean you want to do it again.

I've been more productive
these last 10 years

than I've ever been in my painting life.

I don't feel finished so
it's hard for me to sum up

except to say that I wish I were painting

what I'm painting now being 30 years old.

I love painting.

I mean painting is my life.

Painting is what I live for.