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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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Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Wine
Cigarette
Materials
Label
Ends
Letter
Way
Labels
Things
Dealing
Pick
Carton
Picks
Wrapper
Letters
Originate
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
Robert Motherwell
In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
Robert Motherwell
A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
Robert Motherwell
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
Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.
Robert Motherwell
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
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
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
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
If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.
Robert Motherwell
The main thing is not to be dead.
Robert Motherwell
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
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
Wherever art appears, life disappears.
Robert Motherwell
Art is an experience, not an object.
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
