Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

Image
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
Image
The main thing is not to be dead.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
Robert Motherwell
Image
If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.
Robert Motherwell
Image
Each brushstroke is a decision.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
Robert Motherwell
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
Robert Motherwell