Robert Motherwell Quotes About Painting

Quotes about: Painting

• 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

• Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

  Robert Motherwell

  Choices, Painting, Paint

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

• 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”

• 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

• 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”

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

  Robert Motherwell

  Art, Matter, Painting

  "The Times", November 17, 1985.

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Robert Motherwell

  Anxiety, Abstract Painting, Common

• 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.

  Robert Motherwell

  Opposites, Trying, Painting

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

• 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.

  Robert Motherwell

  Dream, Order, Perception

• 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.

  Robert Motherwell

  Artist, Drawing, Vision

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