Sometime in the 1990s, he pushed a VHS from the Skidmore College Library into a classroom player and the autofocus of his digital camera did its best to record the screen. He transferred it to another VHS, which he showed to his painting students every year. In the summer of 2004, I was seventeen when I saw it.
[7:55] “The Mother and Child. I was seventeen years old. I was studying the Renaissance paintings, as well as de Chirico and Picasso of the ‘20s. Well, you have to come from somewhere, you don’t come from out of the sky.”
Ten years later, I found an email address on his artist website and reached out. My crush on him still loomed almost as large as the painter he made me love. I reintroduced myself, trying to make clear how the film had been lodged in my memory but impossible to find since. I hadn’t become a painter, but instead a video editor, making films about artists. He still had the bootlegged VHS. I told him I could transfer it to DVD for him, and he agreed so long as the tape would be absolutely safe. It was August and with the imminent sweep of fall we didn’t connect.
[22:03] Nothing is ever solved in painting. It's a continuous chain that sometimes doesn't go in one line, but goes in a serpentine line or in the crooked paths, detours, which have to be investigated. I felt like an explorer who almost got to the top of Mount Everest and somehow stopped just short and remembered and thought, “Well, perhaps maybe I forgot some gear, you know, I forgot some equipment.”
Three years went by. I can read the insistence with which I revived the email chain. At the eventual hand off, he had graying hair and bags under his eyes. The father of twin five-year-old girls. He was shorter than I remembered. I transcribed the film word for word and emailed it to myself.
[22:45] What equipment did I lack? A stronger contact with the thickness of things. I suppose I was reacting against being too imaginative and wanted everything to come from things, the graining of wood, the feeling of stone, the corruption of the world, the violence in the world. Nothing new at all.
Over 20 years since my first viewing, I know exactly where the DVD sits on my bookshelf but have no way to play it. I can rent it on Amazon Prime for $4.99 but refuse to. I work for a museum as a video producer, and wrangle a media conservator to help me rip it from the disc. The image pushes through decades of threatened obsolescence, flickering like a more precious object. Behind the humming infection of interference, I think I can hear my teacher breathing.
[27:04] As I look back on this early work now, it's as if I was preparing the scenario, so to speak, unconsciously. I mean, I didn't know that I was doing it. But these fragmentary pictures were all later incorporated in the large work.
Philip Guston's voice is like a clarinet, surprisingly high for the drooping solidity of his body. His eyebrows are white, his hands mitts with a cigarette wedged in. It’s 1980 and he is filmed from the point of acceptance after excommunication, fortified by his strength of judgement and a belief in continuity through change. There’s a powerful honesty in how he corrects himself often, until he uncovers an answer that feels true. He paints a raggedy patch on a Klansman’s dumb hood, the line stuttering masterfully. By the end of the film, the painting has disappeared, scraped down for something with more weight to come. He would die that year.
[33:28] You know that story about someone who knew a child and then seeing the child when he is an adult, says, “My, how you’ve changed”? The child doesn't feel he's changed in that twenty years. He's the subject.
-Sarah Cowan