Robert Motherwell Quotes

Quotes about:

• Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

  Robert Motherwell

  Life, Art, Important

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  69 Copy quote

• Art is an experience, not an object.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Art Is, Objects

  53 Copy quote

• What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you've made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between.

  Robert Motherwell

  Communication, Heart, Interesting

  55 Copy quote

• 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

  Beauty, Uplifting, Song

  47 Copy quote

• 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.

  Robert Motherwell

  Mind, Painting, Mediums

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  33 Copy quote

• Wherever art appears, life disappears.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Umpires, Architecture

  43 Copy quote

• Each brushstroke is a decision.

  Robert Motherwell

  Choices, Decision

  Robert Motherwell, Dore Ashton, Jack D. Flam, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1983). “Robert Motherwell”, Abbeville Pr

  6 Copy quote

• Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

  Robert Motherwell

  Consciousness, Ethical, Painter

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  37 Copy quote

• 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

  Feelings, Needs, Language

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  14 Copy quote

• The main thing is not to be dead.

  Robert Motherwell

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  25 Copy quote

• Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

  Robert Motherwell

  Feelings, Doe, Painting

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  27 Copy quote

• I feel most real to myself in the studio.

  Robert Motherwell

  Real, Feels, Studios

  15 Copy quote

• I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world.

  Robert Motherwell

  Ideas, World, Painting

  Robert Motherwell, Dore Ashton, Jack D. Flam, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1983). “Robert Motherwell”, Abbeville Pr

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  Robert Motherwell

  Children, Flower, Giving

  Robert Motherwell, Dore Ashton, Jack D. Flam, Albright-Knox Art Gallery (1983). “Robert Motherwell”, Abbeville Pr

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Would Be, Painting, Painter

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Creativity, Creative

  23 Copy quote

• One's art is just one's effort to wed oneself to the universe, to unify oneself through union.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Effort, Unions

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  18 Copy quote

• If you can't find your inspiration by walking around the block one time, go around two times-but never three.

  Robert Motherwell

  Block, Inspiration, Two

  14 Copy quote

• Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation

  Robert Motherwell

  Innovation, Century, Twentieth Century

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Realizing, Ends, Thousand

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  23 Copy quote

• A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.

  Robert Motherwell

  Self, Mediums, Interaction

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Encounters, Sometimes

  Robert Motherwell (1999). “The Collected Writings of Robert Motherwell”

  6 Copy quote

• I have been continuously aware that in painting, I am always dealing with... a relational structure. Which in turn makes permission 'to be abstract' no problem at all.

  Robert Motherwell

  Painting, Problem, Abstract

  21 Copy quote

• It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of individual's and society's self-deception.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Self, Deception

  18 Copy quote

• Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.

  Robert Motherwell

  Real, Intelligent, Culture

  16 Copy quote

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