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
Way
Order
Images
Dream
Perceive
Chord
Certain
Perception
Unconsciously
May
Image
Develops
Might
Necessary
Emerge
Sometimes
Usually
Chords
Even
Painting
Subconscious
Kind
Experience
Paintings

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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It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
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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 end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
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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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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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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 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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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
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Each brushstroke is a decision.
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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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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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Art is an experience, not an object.
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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 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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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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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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A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
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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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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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