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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

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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
Suave
Inept
Competence
Dislike
Picture
Also
Skilfully
Looks
Contrariwise
Done
Blundering

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

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Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.
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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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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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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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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Wherever art appears, life disappears.
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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Art is an experience, not an object.
Robert Motherwell
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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.
Robert Motherwell
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To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
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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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
Robert Motherwell
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In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential.
Robert Motherwell
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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.
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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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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For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.
Robert Motherwell
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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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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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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