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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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Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Older
Structures
Structure
Richer
Painting
Symbolic
Started
Paintings
Problem
Opposite
Trying
Opposites
Make
Straight
Basic

More quotes by 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.
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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 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.
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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.
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Each brushstroke is a decision.
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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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The main thing is not to be dead.
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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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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.
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The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
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For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.
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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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It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being.
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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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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.
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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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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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Wherever art appears, life disappears.
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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.
Robert Motherwell