Quote

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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Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Problem
Inventing
Needs
Precisely
Express
Problems
Feeling
Language
Feelings
Else
Staggering

More quotes by 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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Each brushstroke is a decision.
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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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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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Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
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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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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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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
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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The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
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Wherever art appears, life disappears.
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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Art is an experience, not an object.
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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 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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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 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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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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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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It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
Robert Motherwell