Quote

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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Robert Motherwell
Age: 76 †
Born: 1915
Born: January 24
Died: 1991
Died: July 16
Designer
Graphic Artist
Painter
Printmaker
Aberdeen
Washington
Robert Burns Motherwell
Dream
Perceive
Chord
Certain
Perception
Unconsciously
May
Image
Develops
Might
Necessary
Emerge
Sometimes
Usually
Chords
Even
Painting
Subconscious
Kind
Experience
Paintings
Way
Order
Images

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

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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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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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Each brushstroke is a decision.
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A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
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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 may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
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In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.
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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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Art is an experience, not an object.
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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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For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.
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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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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.
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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
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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.
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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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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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Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
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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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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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