Quote

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
Competence
Dislike
Picture
Also
Skilfully
Looks
Contrariwise
Done
Blundering
Suave
Inept

More quotes by 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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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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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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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
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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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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The main thing is not to be dead.
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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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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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 brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
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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Wherever art appears, life disappears.
Robert Motherwell
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Each brushstroke is a decision.
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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Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
Robert Motherwell
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Art is an experience, not an object.
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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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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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