Quote

Each brushstroke is a decision.

Robert Motherwell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Decision
Choices

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

Image
In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Art is an experience, not an object.
Robert Motherwell
Image
To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
Robert Motherwell
Image
Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
Robert Motherwell
Image
The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
Robert Motherwell
Image
If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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