Robert Motherwell Quotes

Quotes about:

• Art is an experience, not an object.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Art Is, Objects

  55 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

  57 Copy quote

• 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”

  70 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”

  35 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”

  38 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

  48 Copy quote

• Wherever art appears, life disappears.

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Umpires, Architecture

  44 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

  8 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”

  28 Copy quote

• The main thing is not to be dead.

  Robert Motherwell

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

  26 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”

  15 Copy quote

• Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation

  Robert Motherwell

  Innovation, Century, Twentieth Century

  17 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

  17 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

  24 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

  20 Copy quote

• I feel most real to myself in the studio.

  Robert Motherwell

  Real, Feels, Studios

  16 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

  15 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

  30 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”

  19 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”

  24 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

  17 Copy quote

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

  Robert Motherwell

  Self, Mediums, Interaction

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Robert Motherwell

  Wine, Mean, Simple

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Robert Motherwell

  Looks, Done, Suave

  9 Copy quote

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

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Modern Life, Unconventional

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

  10 Copy quote

Page 1 of 3

← Prev

1

2

3

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin