Portraits

"My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph."
- Richard Avedon

The Image 1969

“Image making, painting what is around you, what's there. Paint your hand. The other day I was up for two nights and I painted...what do you paint? I don't want to paint art. All I know is, I ate spaghetti that night, so I was involved for three days in painting a plate of spaghetti."
― Philip Guston 

Chiang Mai 2018

"But I don't want to paint a plate of spaghetti because I just ate it. Things get transformed. The mound got higher, like I want to make it bigger. I'm not advertising a spaghetti restaurant, so the mound gets higher and higher. Pretty soon it becomes like a Gustave Dore illustration. Millions of people in this big mass, it becomes a big bloody carnage."
― Philip Guston

Eugene 2013

"So I get this thing where I am trying to paint my head, my self, my hand, a plate of spaghetti. I started working with the body. Paint my teeth? Mimesis, to make a substitute. And that's probably the greatest urge, the idea for making a substitute for reality. To duplicate that reality and in that duplication, it's not duplication, it's like a super-reality. Probably. I'm not sure about it. Beacause what's reality? You don't know what the hell reality is."
― Philip Guston

Urbana 2011

Meeting My Future Wife

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke

Edinburgh

"The observer who is looking for a story will not see it. But the observer who is looking for a certain kind of perfection, a certain kind of freedom, will see it."
- Agnes Martin

Lisbon

"Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody."
- Fernando Pessoa 

 

 

Amsterdam

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."
- Vincent van Gogh 

Paris

"Such a huge Paris! It would take a lifetime to explore it again. This Paris, to which I alone had the key, hardly lends itself to a tour, even with the best of intentions; it is a Paris that has to be lived, that has to be experienced each day in a thousand different forms of torture, a Paris that grows inside you like a cancer, and grows and grows until you are eaten away by it."
- Henry Miller

New York

"It is no easier, I’m convinced, to make a good painting than to find a diamond or a pearl; it requires effort, and you stake your life as a dealer or an artist on it. So once you have good stones, it’s important not to lack faith in yourself....There are no more good paintings than there are diamonds. "
― Vincent van Gogh