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Robert Motherwell - From the Abstraction category:
One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Abstraction category:
Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Abstraction category:
For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Abstraction category:
I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Accidents category:
In the brush doing what it's doing, it will stumble on what one couldn't do by oneself. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Art category:
Art is an experience, not an object. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Choices category:
Every picture one paints involves not painting others. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Choices category:
Each brushstroke is a decision. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Collage category:
Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Collage category:
Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come into existence, save as the consequence to a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Colour category:
The 'pure' red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters' caps and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling toward red and its relations... (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Communication category:
What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you've made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Competence category:
I dislike a picture that is too suave or too skilfully done. But, contrariwise, I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Criticism category:
It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Culture category:
Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is the real subject, of which everything he paints is both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Deception category:
It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Drawing category:
Sketchbooks in general... seem to contain mainly studies for paintings... For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Emotion category:
The game is organizing states of feeling. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Expression category:
In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Form category:
If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back – like Cezanne – to the essential forms of what he sees. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Humour category:
It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Ideas category:
I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Importance category:
Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Inspiration category:
If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two blocks-but never three. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Language category:
The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely? (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Materials category:
To pick up a cigarette wrapper or wine label or an old letter or the end of a carton is my way of dealing with those things that do not originate in me, in my I. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Meaning category:
I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.' (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Meaning category:
In the end I realize that whatever meaning that picture has is the accumulated meaning of ten thousand brushstrokes, each one being decided as it was painted. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Mediums category:
It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being... (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Mediums category:
Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Modernism category:
For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Modernism category:
Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Modernism category:
The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Opposites category:
I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Painting category:
I begin painting with a series of mistakes. The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling. I begin with shapes and colors, which are not related internally nor to the external world; I work without images. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Perception category:
Sometimes images may emerge from some chord in my subconscious, the way a dream might. Even in those paintings where an image unconsciously develops, a certain kind of experience is usually necessary in order to perceive it. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Power category:
It's possible to paint a monumental picture that's only 10 inches wide, if one has a sense of scale, which is very different from a sense of size. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Questions category:
If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response – though he seldom makes it – would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out... (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Reality category:
An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true – to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth – the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Religion category:
It is true that every artist has his own religion. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Struggle category:
A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Subject category:
A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Subject category:
Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Universe category:
One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union. (Robert Motherwell)
Robert Motherwell - From the Writing category:
By far the most common task for which the machines are used is writing – or word processing, as it's known to the same people who call journalism 'content.' (Robert Motherwell)
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