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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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Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Means
Specific
Mean
Limited
Way
Vast
Like
Potential
Wine
Varied
Painting
Expressive
Expression
Vocabulary
Simple
Primitive
More quotes by Robert Motherwell
Art is an experience, not an object.
Robert Motherwell
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
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
If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.
Robert Motherwell
Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
Robert Motherwell
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
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
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
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
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
Each brushstroke is a decision.
Robert Motherwell
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
For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.
Robert Motherwell
A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
Robert Motherwell
Wherever art appears, life disappears.
Robert Motherwell
It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
Robert Motherwell
For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.
Robert Motherwell
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
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
In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
Robert Motherwell
