Quote

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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Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Children
Paint
Flowers
Something
Flower
Complex
Good
Child
Landscape
Like
Natural
Eventually
Form
Sees
Cezanne
Give
Essential
Bouquet
Back
Essentials
Bouquets
Giving
Forms
Complexes

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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.
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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
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To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
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It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
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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.
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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.
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In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
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Art is an experience, not an object.
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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.
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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.
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The main thing is not to be dead.
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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.
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