I posted a Philip Guston quote recently and I’m not sure everyone got from it what I did.
The line that stopped me was:
“Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”
To me, that’s gold.
When I start a painting, the studio is crowded.
There are paintings I’ve made before. Paintings I’ve seen. Artists I admire. Things people have said about my work. Things that have sold. Things that haven’t. Galleries. Collectors. Instagram. Expectations. Doubt.
And probably the loudest person in the room is me.
I arrive with ideas about what the painting might become. I make a mark and immediately judge it. Is that good? Is it bad? Does it look too much like something I’ve already done? Is it too simple? Too messy? Will anyone understand it? Will anyone want it?
That’s a lot of people standing around one canvas.
What I think Guston was getting at is that the real work begins when they start leaving.
You keep painting.
Eventually you stop thinking about the artist whose work you saw yesterday. You stop thinking about the painting you sold last month. You stop thinking about whether somebody will like it.
And then, perhaps, your own ideas about what the painting should be start disappearing as well.
That’s the difficult one.
Because we like to think creativity is about expressing ourselves. Increasingly, I wonder whether some of the best moments happen when we stop trying so hard to do exactly that.
You make a mark because it feels right.
Then another.
Something appears that you didn’t plan. Instead of correcting it, you follow it.
The painting starts suggesting what happens next.
And for a while there’s no judgement. No audience. No strategy. No attempt to make a “Martin Breeze painting”.
There’s just painting.
I think that’s what “even you leave” means.
Not that the artist becomes irrelevant. And certainly not that making art is mindless.
It’s that for a brief period you stop watching yourself make it.
You get out of your own way.
Guston spoke elsewhere about painting until the work became something that seemed to exist independently of him. He described reaching those rare hours when the separation between thinking and doing seemed to disappear.
I know that feeling.
It doesn’t happen every day. Most days the studio is still pretty crowded.
But occasionally I look at something I’ve just done and genuinely don't know where it came from.
Those are usually the moments worth keeping.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve become increasingly interested in painting without knowing the answer. Not because decisions don’t matter, but because knowing too clearly what I’m trying to make can be the very thing that prevents me from finding it.
The goal isn't to become more certain. It's to keep working until all the noise has left the room.
The past. Other artists. The art world. The audience. Your own expectations.
And finally, if you're lucky, you leave too.