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Philip Guston: What's wrong with feeling bad?

I did not hardly sleep at nights, but dreamed all the time about colors and forms

For a long time I did not hardly sleep at nights, but dreamed all the time about colors and forms, and
often, nearly always they were crazinesses in their queerness ...How I suffered in my doubting and would
change again, make a fine drawing and rub weak sickly color on it, and if they told me it was better, it
most drove me crazy, and again I would go back to my old instinct and make frightful work again. It made
me doubt of myself, of my intelligence, of everything, and yet I thought things looked so beautiful and
clear that I need not be mistaken. I think I tried every road possible... What a relief to me when I saw
everything falling into place, as I always had an instinct that it would if I could ever get my bearings all
correct at once...

Thomas Eakins

Steps, shoe prints, or dashes in dance-step diagrams (Andy?), make a kind of map. Call it locomotion, or
"chronography"? Dagwood's Inferno...

Guston's not-gesture or "put" paint in place. Caricature: caricare, to load. "Cliff Sterritt did the best
furniture." Loaded semblances.

The coated figure in Back View with burden of "steps," shoe-ins of experience, identity. Kafka in his diary
wrote, "They know me by my coat."

Pyramid and Shoe, skidoo! (To speak of stopping "when the emotion runs out.")

Interesting to consider the sources of "place": exterior places reflected, as well as where the pictures
come to reside. Larry Fagin claims he could reconstruct a certain downtown L.A. neighborhood where both
he and Guston lived at different times from one of those images of hoods in a car. I thought I caught a
glimpse in Iowa City: a big clock on an old brick building flat against a pale blue sky. No matter, nowhere
as specific as the sites those paintings propose.

You don't need a lot of features to have a face.

No mouths. Black marks say eyes. (We have an "eye" habit.) You're not about to ask how they smoke
those cigars with hoods on, are you? When one smokes, the mouth isn't working. The one mouth that
appears spits out forms.

Ears: one to a head, almost identical to a cup handle, a semi-circle completed by abutting. Wonder what
Guston construes as the sound space for his paintings. In a letter once I took the chance and asked him
was I right that there wasn't any music in his house, much less in the studio no phonograph, radio, etc.
Got no answer, silence.
Titles: Painting, 1954, etc. Who else does that? Like calling a poem Poem, and not Number 2, 1950. Other
Guston (later) titles resemble framed titles of silent films: Bad Habits, Edge of Town.

Words in (or on) a book are vertical marks, like "stand-up" words, like eyes. Guston fixity versus de
Kooning's "wind" where the pages are ever flipped. Under the book is a table, just a slab really. You can
easily imagine a text under the book. The book is entitled Matter. Another drawing, called Water, is 24
squiggles, all vertical on a window pane? In painting, rain falls diagonally. everyone knows that. (A rainy
window by Van Gogh is the exception.)

Journal 3/11/61: "It's like the fable of some last judgment. You want to say this is what I've done, good and
bad, do you get it? But the line is so long you'll never get to be judged anyway." (P.G.) A visit to Philip
Guston's studio: weight in the air different from the buzz or frenetic space of other painters' lofts, and
no( exactly business-like as others' beside, not oppressive either the feeling you could talk there and
hearing what you'd say you'd be surprised. INTEGRITY-in big block letters.

"What's wrong with feeling bad?" (P.G.)

"It may be that poetry makes life's nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely
that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents that are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or
each on specific occasions, or both all the time." Frank O'Hara.

The scale of what art requires of us and what we believe to be real in it. In Guston, substance, the
vernacular, can range from bricks and bubbles to a smear. Well, difficult as it is to arrive at a "smear" in
words, that graphic show has always spelled a confirmation for me as a writer: I really do conceive of
"putting" words, like bricks, in some order in a poem.

His "substitute world, which comes from the world" stepped out of the shadows, as it were. But the dark
pictures of 1960s don't "predict" the later ones; they state duress as a condition of things seen that way.
Shadows are expressive of objects grounded in light.

Default of abstract art: Guston was as ill at ease with abstraction as an operative principle as Pollock was.
And if there exists any parallel, or kin, to G's multiplicity it would be P's black and whites of 1950-51.
(Though the connection is clearest in the drawings of each throughout.)

More on the '60s: Scouring strokes sometimes at gale force, others at a bog. "I'm suffused with the
day/Even tho the day may destroy me." (John Wieners) And the different ways these things come to be:
vortex, float, settled (as layers), tear from fabric, fracture, hunch... Paint pushed, not drawn. Soldered, as
if brush were torch. In drawing, filaments.

A cache of circumstances. Composition need not apply.

You feel the spatial position has been inflicted as much as "won." "The weight of the familiar," seen but
not touched, is perilous to logic.

"Sometimes all you remember from an event is the look in one eye.'