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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.

Robert Motherwell

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Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Behinds
Painting
Behind
Rejected
Modern
Mask
Art
European
Persons
Subject
Person
Tradition
Matter
Subjects

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

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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
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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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It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
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For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.
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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.
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Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
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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.
Robert Motherwell
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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
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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
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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?
Robert Motherwell
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A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
Robert Motherwell
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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.
Robert Motherwell
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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.
Robert Motherwell
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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
Robert Motherwell
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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