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" "I maintain that the frustration is an important, almost crucial, ingredient. I think that the best painting involves frustration. The point about the late Rembrandt [paintings] is not that it's satisfying but on the contrary that it is disturbing and frustrating. Because really, what he [Rembrandt] has done is to eliminate any plane - anything between that image and you. The Van Dyck [portrait] hasn't. It says [only] I'm a painting. The Rembrandt says: I am not a painting, I am a real man. But he is not a real man either. What is it then, that you are looking at?
Philip Guston (1913-07-27 – 1980-06-07) was a notable painter of the New York School, which included many of the Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning. In the 1960's Guston helped to lead the transition from Modernism to Post-Modernism in painting, abandoning the so-called 'pure abstraction' of Abstract Expressionism in favor of more cartoon-like renderings of various personal symbols and objects.
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I was forced and pushed into the kind of painting that I did [during the late 1940's / early 1950's]. That is to say, the demands in this dialogue with myself – I give to it, I make some marks, it speaks to me, I speak to it, we have terrible arguments going on all night, weeks and weeks – do I really believe that? I make a mark, a few strokes, I argue with myself, not do I like or not, but is it true or not? Is that what I mean, is that what I want?
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[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.