Philip Guston by Craig Burnett

Author:Craig Burnett [Craig Burnett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2014-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

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Draw an X from each of the four corners of The Studio and the lines intersect at the base of the densest nub of smoke at the billowing heart of the picture. The plume of smoke seems to rise out of nowhere, emerging spontaneously at some distance from the tip of the cigarette. If you had to pick a spot, the smoke looks like it smoulders into life at the point where the black handle of the brush meets the knuckle of the red hand, as if they were rubbing together, generating friction. As the smoke swirls and rises, everything else in the picture appears still and frozen. Look at the tip of the paintbrush in the hood’s hand: it stops in the same relative position of the smoke, as if the hood – and Guston – paused to wonder how to paint the smoke, or whether to include it in the painting at all. Dumbstruck, the hood fixes the twin bars of his black eyes on the smoke rather than the task at hand – the self-portrait in front of him – as if he was frozen in horror or aesthetic rapture. I don’t want to carry on painting this cartoonish portrait of myself, he seems to say, I want to get lost in the flow of this delicious arabesque. The smoke is an image of smouldering impurity, delight and defeat. It is at once an expressive passage of paint and an allegory of expressiveness, evoking everything from the trails of steam or smoke that fill the sky of many a nineteenth-century landscape, to a nuclear mushroom cloud, to a spectre who haunts the hood, to a golem emerging from greasy layers. Whatever it is, even this dim-eyed hood can’t look away. He knows that something significant lurks in the whorls of sooty grey.

Imagine The Studio without the puff of smoke. (If irreverence isn’t a problem, erase it outright with Photoshop, cloning the pink around it to fill the gap.) The effect is startling. The studio seems too clean, a bit too pure. An expanse of placid pink fills the empty space between the hood’s eyes and easel. He seems to stare into nothingness. Tension and anguish disappear. Looking at The Studio for the first time, a viewer would probably apprehend the picture in the order that I have structured this book. First you see a depiction of a comic-book narrative: a fat-fingered bozo taking the afternoon off to paint and smoke. Then you sense the overall structure of the picture, the sense of uplift, the surface and its scruffy facture, all the ambiguous, unplaceable forms achieved with a swift application of thick paint: The Studio comes to life as a painting. You are then asked to consider the mystery of the puff of smoke at the centre. First an image; then a painting; and then it is as if the whole apparatus of the picture exists to frame the puff, to give this patch of formlessness some kind of allegorical import.

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