Quote

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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Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Ten
Ends
Picture
Decided
Meaning
Realize
Thousand
Accumulated
Realizing
Painted
Whatever

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
Robert Motherwell
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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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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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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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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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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
Robert Motherwell
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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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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 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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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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Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
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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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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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
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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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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