Philip Guston in the Night Studio and the space of forgetting
Philip Guston made his first realist painting after over a decade of working through the expressionist house style of Manhattan. It was an image of a shoe lying on its side directed at the audience. Painted in Guston’s now familiar style, the paint kept wet on a ground of modulated white on top of wet black oil paint and pink showing through with this over-painting a greyish white, colours bled from one part of the paint through to another, A white edge would occur from a grey mark not fully mixed on the palette, the white squeezing out from the brush pressed hard onto the panel. The panel was important at this time, Guston was painting fast and furiously as if time was running out. There was no time to let paint dry and return to it later for a more polished succinct finish between image and ground, these paintings seem to start and finish in front of you, in an at onceness, that hinted at the aesthetic demand that Michael Fried was to espouse, for a painting that you got ‘all at once’.
‘Paw’ painted at the same time in that same summer of fury becomes a portent of things to come. It was as if Guston was spewing out all these stored and repressed images that had been squashed inside him throughout his long convoluted years toiling within the expressionist orthodoxy of eschewing all representation. The ‘Paw’ painting again re-states that moment in nearly all painters’ work, the need to state that this is a painting, this is a hand painting the painting. Even though Clark has returned to this point many times it is an inexhaustible moment that very few painters seem to avoid. How is it possible to paint a painting of the act of painting, without it becoming a tremendous act of pathos hinting at the finitude of the act and the mortality of the artist. A series of reflections and refractions on the act and the moment that becomes absurdist in its attempts to describe to another, what it is like to just be, as an artist in the world, whilst at the same time having to be an artist not of this world. As Guston, put it so pithily, ‘first, you have to forget your family, then you forget your friends and finally you forget yourself’ and when you have done that you are free to paint. What happens in the mind and in front of you when you realise that the line in ‘Paw’ is the description of a line in another painting or drawing. Is ‘Paw’ painting the painting, but what then is painting ‘Paw’, other than that great clumsy Guston, possessing a clumsiness that is more akin to the Yiddish condition of klezmer rather than klutz. There are quick forays into the surface of the painting as if the painting will disappear unless it is done as soon as possible, then almost immediately there is a retraction, a step back or sideways, a lurching dive scrubbing out what went before in such a way that the colour shifts with the underpainting mixing into the colour. Then just when it seems to look hopeless, something happens and this image of a great big mitt holding a short stubby stick, a pencil cut short arrives onto the painting, it could be a hand from a Shelton cartoon, it could be Guston’s great galumphing hand, describing a line on a page. A line that is shifted a changed and over painted and finally left to its own devices. There is little attempt to fix the hand up, make it look better in fact it would seem that various additions to the image, such as shadow description, hair on the arm have been made with a similar sized brush as the ground painting, so increasing the air of cack handedness and general wrongness. A wrongness that only comes from knowing full well what ought to be right is.
