Rug 1976

Philip Guston made ‘Rug’ with oil on canvas, and right away you notice how the colors aren’t trying to be pretty. It's like he's digging into the paint, smearing and layering with a real physical intensity. The whole thing feels raw. The paint is thick in places, almost sculptural, and then thin and washy elsewhere. Take a look at that red rug – it’s not just a color, it's a mass of clotted pigment, like he's wrestling with the material itself. The forms are heavy, cartoonish, and slightly menacing, but there’s a vulnerability there too. I think of Guston as a kind of bridge between de Kooning and someone like Peter Saul. He's not afraid to be ugly, funny, and deeply serious all at once, and that's what makes his work so alive. For Guston, like all of us, art is a process.