"This was the beginning. They are self-portraits. I percieve myself as being behind a hood. In a new series of "hoods" my attempt was not really to illustrate, to do pictures of the KKK, as I had done earlier. The idea of evil fascinated me, and rather like Isaac Babel who had joined the Cossacks, lived with them and written stories about them, I almost tried to imagine that I was living with the Klan. What would it be like to be evil? To plan and plot. Then I started conceiving an imaginary city being taken over by the Klan. I was like a movie director. I couldn't wait, I had hundreds of pictures in mind and when I left the studio I would make notes to myself, memos, "Put them all around the table, eating, drinking beer." Ideas and feelings kept coming so fast; I couldn't stop, I was sitting on the crest of a wave. In the picture Cellar I wondered what it would look like to have a bunch of figures, scared, diving down into a cellar. I painted it in about four hours without any erasures. And when it was done I said, "Ah ..., so that is what it would look like.""

Guston, Philip. "Philip Guston Talking" (lecture at the University of Minnesota, March 1978), in Philip Guston. Ed., McKee, Renee (London, Whitechapel, 1982), pp.49 -56