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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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Art is an experience, not an object.
Robert Motherwell
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The main thing is not to be dead.
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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It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
Robert Motherwell
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Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
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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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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For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.
Robert Motherwell