Art & Creativity Quote by Philip Guston

Guston’s line slices against the polite fiction that painting is just “representation.” “Possessing” is a brazen verb: it implies appetite, control, even theft. He’s not describing a mirror held up to the world; he’s describing a hand closing around it. That’s the studio truth he’s after: the painter doesn’t simply record what’s seen, they take it, translate it into a private language of touch, revision, and insistence. The canvas becomes a site of capture, where the world is re-owned by the mind and the body.

The wording also smuggles in an ethical discomfort. If painting is possession, then it’s never neutral. It involves choice, exclusion, distortion, the quiet violence of framing. Guston knew that intimately. He moved from Abstract Expressionism’s high-minded purity to his late, blunt cartoons of hoods, shoes, cigarettes, and anxious rooms - images that looked almost willfully “low,” yet carried heavy moral weather. Those works don’t “picture” evil at a safe distance; they implicate the painter in it, as if making the image is a way of admitting proximity and responsibility.

Context matters: postwar American art often performed a split between gesture (authentic self) and image (suspect narrative). Guston collapses that divide. Possession is what gesture always was: a claim. Painting, for him, is not about depicting life so much as trying to hold it still long enough to wrestle it into meaning.