Sylvester: What about figuration in a more literal sense? - Philip Guston

Painting and sculpture are very archaic forms. It's the only thing left in our industrial society where an individual alone can make something with not just his own hands, but brains, imagination, heart maybe. It's a very archaic form. Same things can be said with words, writing poetry, making sounds, music. It is a unique thing.. ..I think that the original revolutionary impulse behind the New York School, as I felt it anyway, and as I think my colleagues felt and the way we talked all the time, was a kind of a.. ..you felt as if you were driven into a corner against the wall, with no place to stand, just the place you occupied as if the act of painting was not making a picture.. ..it was as if you had to prove to yourself that truly the act of creation was still possible.. ..I felt as if I was talking to myself, having a dialectical monologue with myself to see if I could create.

[On the question: 'What was your main stylistic influence up to this time']: The Renaissance chiefly - Piero, Mantegna, Uccello - but I was attracted also by the modern idioms - Léger, Picasso - and was close to the abstract painters on the project such as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, etc. At the time I did the Queens project, there was already a marked change in my work - it was becoming more concerned with cubist concepts of treating space.

To will a new form is inacceptable, because will builds distortion. Desire too, is incomplete and arbitrary. These strategies, however intimate they might become, must especially be removed to clear the way for something else – a condition somewhat unclear, but which in retrospect becomes a very precise act. This 'thing' is recognized only as it comes into existence. It resists analysis - and probably this is as it should be. Possibly the moral is that art cannot and should not be made.