Robert Motherwell Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“Wherever art appears, life disappears.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“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.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“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 -
“For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“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.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“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 -
“Every picture one paints involves not painting others.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“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 -
“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 -
“The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“It is true that every artist has his own religion.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“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 -
“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 -
“For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“The main thing is not to be dead.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.”
-- Robert Motherwell -
“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.”
-- Robert Motherwell
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