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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
Make
Straight
Basic
Older
Structures
Structure
Richer
Painting
Symbolic
Started
Paintings
Problem
Opposite
Trying
Opposites

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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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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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A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
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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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The main thing is not to be dead.
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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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The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
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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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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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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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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
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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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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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If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.
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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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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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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.
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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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Wherever art appears, life disappears.
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