NOTE ON PHILIP GUSTON

The Impossibility of Painting

If art is self-effacement to begin with, no one who has not experienced something of this will understand, the word that comes closest is perhaps touch, the ephemeral feel of the pencil in my hand as I write. Now you are writing things down that you read, making “arrangements,” drawing from a notebook, drawing from a notebook, composing, trying not to think “composing,” what in the end (and trying not to think this too) it may be junk. So be it. Rule: Go to extremes. Keep doing these kinds of things (kinds of things), going forward by going back, shifting things but just a little. Choosing not to write in ink. I chose some months ago not to write in ink. I prefer [It prefers] pencil. Ink is good because it forces you to make decisions, to decide, to “stick” to things, but the provisionality of pencil (“to erase”) allowing you to layer [allowing it to layer], palimpsestic spaces – flat – on the surface. Ghosted words held down and spread. I have a pretty palette. It isn’t my vocabulary. I never steal. I write. Sometimes he can’t read his own . . . hand. The notebook entries going every other way – intersecting at the oddest angles – quoted passage fading into something just arrived at, “fresh.” He convinced himself he was Piero. You’ve been following his voice and he convinced himself. He leaped, or so it appeared, from coal black, blocky, head-like masses on wintry gray grounds to . . . There were no bridge paintings in the show. His past – hoods and pink cities – emphatically over, a switch installed on his telephone so he could turn it off. Now, blocky shapes, open brushwork, blocks had become people and things, boxy cars, Krazy Kat mesas, heavy black outlines, “Hoods.” And, of course, they do evoke the comics. Clunkiness stands as a blunt reminder. Free hand drawings. He had been led by the cockeyed landscapes of Surrealism, not the flatness of Cubism. His abstract paintings, with their “hierarchical attitude toward form,” preserved the distinction between foreground and background that belonged to the history of figuration where the picture plane is not essentially flat, called up the visually distinctive, thematically quirky older strips of the teens, twenties, and thirties. And, evidently, the opening night of the Marlborough show was unpleasant. “Well, let me just look at it another minute.” He wanted to tell a story.  Not just “diddle around” with placement, color, formally imperative determinations. Discriminations were emerging, the making of the surface in itself a palette, “getting close,” not pulling back from what he’d done till it was “finished.” [It was finished.] And he brought this new immediacy to tell his stories, which in time became more personal, increasingly isolated – a large yellow wheel against a flat red surface. He was dead. And she was still alive, though barely. Muse. Entering the city once again at times, collecting knick knacks for the barn, and making coffee. I can see her sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee in her cup and looking out the window at the snow, the birds pecking ground. The way he used to sit there late at night. Drink. All I can do honestly is give you my questions. I hope you will find some use for them. That’s all I can do. You take the greatest thing and turn it into a banality. By repeating. Right now I’m passionate about what I’m going to do. But after some years, I’m under no illusion. I don’t even want to talk about it – where I’m going, might be going, where I’ve been.  It snowed today. I was just outside. The birds were almost quiet. If I could stay with what I’m doing. If I could stay. I don’t want to be unhappy – stuck or stopped – but you have to be more explanatory. You can – if only you could know this, understand what I’ve been saying – help me. But you can’t. I want to be more specific. Really I do. I’d like to give you details – how the heads began to happen – but I can’t. I want to answer all your questions. But I was only working towards an image. And it bothers me. It does. The head. That bothered me. This area, this world, the rectangle. Afterwards I got real critical. A rough period. I drew. I had to draw. For a couple years. But then you already knew that. Things. And I was worried, instinctively I mean. I was worried. I felt eaten alive by all this. Something was bothering me. Like this finger . . . here. A picture of me, a self-portrait – a head, a hand, a brush. But what I want to know.  How do I know? To see what happens, what will hold. There’s no such thing, you know that, painting now. Not anymore.  I mean, who’s a painter?  I don’t know anymore, Chuck. I really couldn’t tell you. Try and torture me. I really couldn’t say. You put your finger . . . Right, I know what that picture is. I didn’t paint it. It moved right through me. And then, like a dope, for six months I tried to do more. Then I got the black, I got into the mud, the muck, once again. Chaos. I had a kind of breakdown, had to stop. You have to be more alone to paint. I feel more alone now. It is a joy to be with (near) you. It is important that the act of preservation (writing is continuing) as a type of obscuration (Auskratzen) is presented. To originate is carefully, patiently, lovingly, to combine. Invention, and we must remember this, means finding. What am I looking for? It’s like the zoo after hours. The facts talk to one another. Begin the story of arrangements. Portraits inseparable from prayers. We have all, of course, had childhoods. Composed in ink on uniform sheets (on a grid), stab bound, tied with string. Something in the way the elements of the music are chosen, something unrecognizable, a signature, a voice. Notes. Poems hung on walls like windows. Not that I had ever thought of painting. I think that you will like it. A word, precisely placed, describing itself. And people said of me one night  . . . The cathedral is across the street. Solitary lead marks. Pages now appearing empty frames. “Distance lingers in her hand.” A hand like his remembering over her breast that afternoon on Mary Street, the old Mary Street, not even on a map back then, unfolds to almost speak (foreignly, familiarly) their own. And instead of turning the page when it is done, and looking over at the desk, she places the card on the chair, through the window: cobbles catching fire (glass). And though the glass is mentioned, it is not present, but abstract. Something abstract. Not exactly here. There. Perhaps this will be a big book of very little definition. Perhaps. An improvised paper on hermetic poetry. In spite of all my talk about the way the page looks, and particularly in regard to these pages being constructed as if they were a sort of drawing – strangely, the strongest element I feel when I am writing something is acoustic, something hopelessly mixed (naturally), and at the same time, hardened. I feel I’m losing control to gain a surface. The boards along the wall like glass. But the feeling for seeing in a poem, where the plane of color changes (childhood) the second word on top of the first, an allusion to leaves, conjuring a space. Among the gaffes and bungles, I think there is the occasional apercu of disintrication, thinking always of the fringes, cold walks, lines leading nowhere. So things are, perhaps, a little less wretched, but I feel now (what have I discarded) that something large, which was squatting on me, has stood up and waddled away – margins, notes, ineptitudes. Nothing was completed but a lot of sketches, doodlings on a grid to pass the time – sloppy clit-like drawings, pulse-like strokes and stem-like patterns, edges left in raw, letters verging loops done slowly fainting pencil, cocks. Skewed, dynamic, meter shift, transcribing flattest ink and scoring cardboard (scribbling notational images), thickly marking margins, surfaces in horizontal loops across a chalk-white glaze pressing, rhythmic, smeared, irrelevant to private space, exuding and compressed – a long private conversation. Modesty, care, a kind of helplessness. You can see the prose stepping off. Forgetfulness. I make these drawings when I write. Collage. Intense selection. A collection of torn sheets, fragments, moving things around this floating world.