Art & Creativity Quote by Philip Guston

Guston is doing something sly here: he’s yanking painting off the wall and relocating it where it’s always been doing its real work anyway - inside your head. The “plane which is imagined” isn’t an airy, mystical claim so much as a practical one. A canvas is cloth and pigment, sure, but the actual picture only “happens” when perception assembles it into depth, light, narrative, feeling. The physical object is the decoy; the image is the event.

The line “It moves in a mind” is the key. Guston isn’t flattering the viewer with participation trophies; he’s stressing how unstable picturing is. What seems fixed is constantly revised by memory, desire, and expectation. That’s why “what you see is not what you see”: the first seeing is sensation, the second is interpretation, and the gap between them is where art gets its leverage. He’s also smuggling in a critique of literalism - the idea that a painting’s meaning is sitting there like a label on a jar. For Guston, the jar is empty unless the mind pours something in.

Context matters. Coming out of Abstract Expressionism and later swerving into raw, cartoonish figuration, Guston knew how quickly a style can harden into doctrine. Calling painting “magic” is both romantic and corrective: it resists the museum habit of treating artworks as stable artifacts. He’s insisting on painting as a trick that keeps working precisely because it never fully resolves into the merely material.