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Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

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
Involves
Picture
Paint
Painting
Choices
Others
Every
Paints

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

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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.
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.
Robert Motherwell
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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.
Robert Motherwell
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The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
Robert Motherwell
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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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For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.
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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Art is an experience, not an object.
Robert Motherwell
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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.
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.
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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A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
Robert Motherwell
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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.
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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Wherever art appears, life disappears.
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 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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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
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The main thing is not to be dead.
Robert Motherwell