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

More quotes by Robert Motherwell

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Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.
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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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The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.
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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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The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?
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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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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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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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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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A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
Robert Motherwell
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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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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
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It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.
Robert Motherwell
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Every picture one paints involves not painting others.
Robert Motherwell
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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.
Robert Motherwell
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The main thing is not to be dead.
Robert Motherwell
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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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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 a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.
Robert Motherwell
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Art is an experience, not an object.
Robert Motherwell