The Job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery – Francis Bacon
I’ve been painting for many years and still the whole business is a big mystery to me. Sometimes I look around in my studio at paintings I’ve done and I wonder, how did I do that, how did I get my imagination to that place, how did I express it (whatever IT was), just so?
Sometimes I’ll work on paintings a long time. I work and rework and rethink and re-imagine and it seems like I’m getting nowhere at all, and then suddenly I sometimes will get a moment of clarity, when painting seems obvious and easy and without any of my usual nagging doubt.
Where is that place? I think most painters, writers, musicians know what I’m talking about – the well-spring, the place where painting is thinking and form and content flow as one. It’s scary in there – I’ve alluded to it in some of my painting titles – The Source, Lost Forest, Forest of No Return, Underground. Mostly I get there for fleeting seconds, but there have been times when painting flows like breathing and I’ve felt that I could fill 100 canvases if only I didn’t stop.
I’m not very good at talking about my paintings. When I’m working there are so many ideas going on at once and so many nagging limitations too, but when a painting comes together it seems beyond words, as if anything I might say about it would only detract. I think that’s what I’m after in a sense, paintings that are beyond words.
I don’t know what a painting is; who knows what sets off even the desire to paint? It might be things, thoughts, a memory, sensations, which have nothing to do directly with painting itself. They can come from anything and anywhere – Philip GustonDeluge, 2010
Sometimes I’ll make a painting that sticks with me for reasons I don’t really understand. That was the case with Deluge, for instance, a painting from 2010. I kept it hanging around my studio since I painted it. It continues to fascinate me. I think of it as “ugly” and maybe that’s all it is, or maybe it seems ugly because it doesn’t fall into whatever preconceptions I have about what art might be. In my mind Deluge seems to just barely hold together as a painting. It’s awkward and clunky and made of crappy materials like corrugated cardboard. I like it because it’s raw and in your face. I’ve wanted that one to have a good home, but then I think, who would want to hang that?
27th Street 
It’s always so enlightening to peer into the mind of the artist. It’s fascinating to speculate on where others tuck away their muse.