Robert Motherwell Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.
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A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
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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.
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If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.
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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.
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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.
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The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
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Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.
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Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.
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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.
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To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
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In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best ... better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever ... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work.
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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.
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Each brushstroke is a decision.
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It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
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Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.
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Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
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I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.
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It is true that every artist has his own religion.
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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.
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Wherever art appears, life disappears.
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I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.
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Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject.
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The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?
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Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
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The main thing is not to be dead.
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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.
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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.
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