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. Philip Guston (June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980) was a painter and printmaker in the New York School, which included many of the abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. 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.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. During his lifetime he seemed an outsider, but now the world of painting seems to have regrouped around him. To read this book front-to-back is to witness his paintings gradually outpace Guston’s ability to describe them.The wealth of information on the creative process, metaphysics, philosophy, art, painting, and anything similar is honestly unreal.

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? No criptic arty language but relatable and approachable writing about making a painting, this proves to me that's mostly art critics that makes art a difficult subject, for artist it all more simple. Faith, Hope, and Impossibility and On Morton Feldman are two essays I think every artist should read.So here we are, I am not the biggest fan of his work but there is something about artists, people who produce art, breath art, live art, and of course always think about art, that makes their discussions, thoughts and writings about art, absolutely fascinating. Dialogues – with interlocutors like his friends Harold Rosenberg or Clark Coolidge, or with his students at Boston University or the Yale Summer School of Music and Art – allowed Guston to play out in a public forum the equivocations that informed the paintings made in the privacy of the studio.

If you are not really into art, perhaps you will enjoy it less, but I firmly believe that reading and, in this case, almost listening, to someone who discusses the subject he is the most passionate about can not fail to captivate the reader.Abstract at times, there were moments when I had no idea what he was on about, but others where he was irresistibly captivating. 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. Remember that when Guston had his first 'stumble-bum' exhibition there was lots of exciting figurative painting and image-making happening.