The painting is not on a surface, but on a plane which is imagined. It moves in a mind. It is not there physically at all. It is an illusion, a piece of magic, so that what you see is not what you see.

His mother supported his artistic inclinations and he often made drawings in a small closet lit by a hanging bulb. Before dropping out of Otis Guston spent a night in the studio making drawings of these figurative plasters scattered all over the studio floor. Vrain Schwankovsky and were introduced to modern European art oriental philosophy theosophy and mystic literature.

Philip Guston (June 27 1913 – June 7 1980) was a painter and printmaker in the New York School which included many of the abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning.