22 October 2025
From Guston's studio notes in I Paint What I Want To See (2022): “The only true impulse is realism” (page 252). Felt applicable to my current headspace when I re-read it today, especially in conjunction with starting my morning by watching Phoebe Helander's recent talk at the New York Studio School, which was oriented around the act of deep looking within constantly changing surroundings, lack of attachment to outcome, and how cultivating sustained attention in one's practice leads to a fuller/less degraded life. It's significant how these concepts have continued to reappear in what I've been reading and watching the past few weeks, and how a realist impulse seems to clear the way for engagement with them all. But I think what Helander helped to elucidate is how it might be more useful to think of this approach not as something rooted in realism, but rather in observation-based absorption. No subject is better or worse than any other in this context.