Robert Motherwell Quotes

Art is an experience, not an object.

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

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.

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.

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

Each brushstroke is a decision.

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.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

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

The main thing is not to be dead.

The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?

Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation

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

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.

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.

I feel most real to myself in the studio.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.