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Where do you put a form? It will move all 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 been paid for, or a form that has not been lived through.
Philip Guston
The
only knowledge, wit or wisdom I have for now is that my paintings
come from silence and a world of abandonment. In another world there
is this wrestling and restless engagement with things such as
aesthetics and truth in which I can sometimes aggressively
articulate my experiences and carve them in stone as though
unbreakable and, at the next turn, smash these tablets of truth with
little regard for what, yesterday, was the law of belief. In this
world of silence, no truth exists; there is the abandonment of power
that truth manifestly becomes in that other world of dogma, ideology
and aesthetic certainty. The silence becomes the painting, the
painting comes from silence. It is the moment when painting is no
longer an act of doing or making but of receiving. There is no ego
shape here, no facilitative reply to aesthetic notions, whether
historical or contemporary, there is only that desperate faith of
the abandoned...and there is the discovery and rediscovery of 'Art'
which is exhilarating.
Patrick Graham
Living in New York City I sometimes think, sure, it would
be beautiful to be out in the countryside and paint nature. I'd love
to go out and sit down in front of a landscape with a lake and paint
the reflections and birds and all kinds of wildlife. And start
describing each living thing and paint it as I see it. And then I
said, well I'm in a landscape already. The landscape I live in is
the landscape of ripped drawings, of paint all over the place, of
pencil sketches and drawings that have been compiled, images that
have been thought about and turned and twisted. And suddenly I
realize that I am in the landscape, and this is my landscape, and
there's no point in trying to run away. I may as well just make art
of it. George
Condo
One can, in fact,
abandon oneself (not however without some second thoughts) to the
call of that which is seen and keenly felt. The real is the
springboard; it gives the impetus to everything that will ensue.
There is nothing to do but let yourself go. Jean
Fautrier
It is the bareness of drawing that I like.
The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it
seems enough to draw, without the distractions of colour and mass.
Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one. Usually
I draw in relation to my painting, what I am working on at the time.
On a lucky day a surprising balance of forms and spaces will appear
and I feel the drawing making itself, the image taking hold. This in
turn moves me towards painting - anxious to get to the same place,
with the actuality of paint and light. Philip
Guston
In front of a drawing made a long
time ago, one can still come back to the moment it was made by
looking at it again. Yves Berger
Man
gets tired of himself. Man is obsessed with himself. I would like
some day to capture a moment of life in its full violence, its full
beauty. That would be the ultimate painting.
Francis Bacon
My line is childlike but not childish. It is very
difficult to fake: To get that quality you need to project yourself
into the child's line. It has to be felt. Cy Twombly
I
never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never
here: it is always last year or next week. from The End of the
Affair, by Graham Greene
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