Philip Guston

And using all these, like, little things that we know about Philadelphia history or some of the mythology of Philadelphia as well that kind of, like, play into the imagery.

And I wanted these figures to be women of color, but I wanted them to be in the same way that Philip Guston's gladiators mask all the children at play.

You know, they, they're kind of lost in their roles.

They become the thing, you know.

Different way of thinking, different way of expressing yourself, moving something forward.

Like there's an artist, Philip Guston, for example, has really inspired me in the way he was like...

Like what's true almost to any successful artist is that they're very good at their craft.

So like you gotta be a really good painter to start with.

No, you couldn't.

And, you know, it's great because they come from such a deep knowledge and craftsmanship that eventually they decide to leave things behind or, or do their own version of it.

But Philip Guston was a great painter who was like a figurative painter in the early years, had like a pretty successful career.

And then...

And those severe breaks are really difficult.

But, you know, I've been telling people that, you know, I I don't I don't feel like I feel like I'm always still looking for my Guston moment, you know, and that's like Philip Guston when he was like middle aged.

He'd been doing, you know.

A lot of like.

the person painting the paint like moving the paint around and um the idea that you could get you could somehow by looking very closely you can actually get about a bit back into that you can have a kind of mirror affect a mirrored feeling of what rembrandt felt when he was painting it and maybe that is one thing that like close looking or something can do which i don't know if i literally believe that but i like the idea of trying to do that

I remember when we read Philip Guston and he said that he, I don't remember exactly the anecdote to tell it, but it was something like that, you know, that if he died in front of all these people, he will have all these things to talk about with all these different painters at different moments in history because they just they just have been having this conversation through like material and making and doing and gesture and stuff that in a sense i feel this text is about like yeah how do you get to be in those how do you learn to be a person in those conversations instead of just just see this just read these things at this specific like checkpoints that you have to command the knowledge and oh i know this command you know i know who rembrandt was i know who he is in the history of painting I know about the self-portraits, I know this and that, but it's like, oh yeah, how can you understand reading this painting by these men? You know what I mean? As reading this thing, as like this mode of communication that is coming to you from such a specific time and geography and human being, that person is giving you something and then you're receiving that, which is bonkers because I'm such a nerd.

Like I love reading all this stuff around things like that, but it's like one thing should not be, confused by the other be mistaken by the other there are different things that happen together but one does not replace the other

yeah exactly and I think that that is the other thing is that I again a bit like engaging with whatever very famous dominant ideas or something I think it's fine to theorize it's it's really important to place you know to historicize and to think about the histories of artworks and art history in relation to wider political context and stuff but That's like a really big bit of what we do in the art school as university has it.

This thing that, you know, you're happy when you paint.

The people around love you, love your paint, your paintings.

To kind of like take a step out of that and jump into the uncertainty and... painfulness that it is to make art you know what i mean and i would say that probably i would say that most people if not everybody that i know even if what they're doing is painter and there are painters it's not fun you know what i mean it's like it's a horrible crisis again like all these texts are like why are we painting why paint is that this constant like you know challenge why why What can I, you know, what should I be painting? Should I be painting this? Does this make any sense? You know, you go to the studio, like, you know, all those videos, like Philip Guston doing that painting that to me looked amazing.

I got it to the point of being like, I throw it out.

where the blood test every month is essentially binary, and the book is not yet closed.

We talked about cliche as a sedimented truth, about why Drake said there has to be something wrong with a pop hit, about what Philip Guston understood that most painters don't, and we talked about what changed in the studio after cancer and what stayed the same, and about why, in the end, he couldn't stop making things, even when he had every reason to.

This dude was literally ordering paper from Blick on his hospital bed.

Here is my conversation with Vijay Mashrani.

There's a pool that reflects the people behind, and there's a sort of strangeness about his work as well.

Like Philip Guston said something about that painting as well, that there's these angels at the side that are looking at John the Baptist putting the water over Jesus's head, and he says something about that the angels are looking as if they've just arrived.

I think the idea that they've just arrived on Earth for the first time, and they're seeing everything for the first time.

And you look at the angels' faces, and you sort of think, "Yeah, they have that look in their face." Maybe that's one pivotal painting when you think of when that was painted and how it still has that, affects people-

It has always been a bad move.

I think it was bad when they did it to Philip Guston during like peak woke.

I think it was bad when the campaign to torpedo Yayoi Kusama over something that she wrote

in like the late 60s.

And that's how you could say this about life in a lot of ways.

And then, well, there was a very famous, one of my favorite artists of all time, Philip Guston, a painter, famous quote where he says, "When you start a painting, everybody you've ever known is in the room with you.

Every teacher, every classmate, every artist that you ever read about is in that room with you, and one by one they leave while you're making that painting.

And then eventually you even leave." And I'm like, okay, I don't think I've left the building quite completely, but I do feel like the pathetic amount of work that I do put out, most of it is very much my own, which is something that I think you can only do when you get older.