Robert Motherwell Quotes - Page 2

Abstract expressionism was the first American art that was filled with anger as well as beauty.

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.

It's possible to paint a monumental picture that's only 10 inches wide, if one has a sense of scale, which is very different from a sense of size.

I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.

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.

For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.

The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.

Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.

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.

It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium, that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being.

It is true that every artist has his own religion.

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.

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.

For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.

To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.

An odd contradiction, if the layman were correct in his unconscious assumption that an artist begins with reality and ends with art: the converse is true - to the degree that this dichotomy has any truth - the artist begins with art, and through it arrives at reality.

One of the most striking aspects of abstract art's appearance is her nakedness, an art stripped bare.

Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

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.

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.

In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best ... better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever ... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work.

The public's appetite for famous people is a mouth as big as a mountain.

In the brush doing what it is doing, it will stumble on what one could not do by oneself.

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.