PG

To practice, writing again. Remembering the book I found of Guston memories some years ago in Oslo, a book I did not buy and an experience I did not quite compute but that is circling back now with all things 2022. I don’t understand how the time is meted out (falsetto) but I do understand Guston and I do love him and wish perhaps that I was born not in mid morning but at night so I could be more nocturne than diurnal and paint on his clock, too. It’s silly to wish, I thought I was long past wishing until I wrote that out. Want is more like it and really in fact I don’t want, wouldn’t change a thing. The book was a paean collected from his friends and this morning accounting for the dregs of a water spill, necessary clearing spill upon my desk I found among survivors one of my little blue note cards, probably from late spring on which I had inscribed:

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.

John Cage to PG.

And beneath it:

Personal elaboration: first of all, not sure where “I” am always to begin with. And isn’t it, to be very old fashioned, a dialing of the radio…

Last year stranded me without Influence so I was forced to unlearn it or to be shaped by other things. I do think there are of course priors in the paintings but I am liking what Jeff Wall said in a recent recording: that all of art history is to be called upon at will simply as energies always contemporary, always alive and something from the past is as alive as its animated use value or currency of transformation in the now. This seems apt and always and I liked hearing it vocalized and I would like to enunciate that which fits the bill, comes to mind.