Robert Motherwell Quotes

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

Art is an experience, not an object.

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.

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 true that every artist has his own religion.

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

Each brushstroke is a decision.

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.

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

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.

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

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