Robert Motherwell Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

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

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.

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

Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation

The main thing is not to be dead.

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

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.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

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

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

Art is an experience, not an object.

I feel most real to myself in the studio.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

A main part of the struggle of art has been to make an art that is direct, simple, humane, unconnected with powers that be in their essence... To the degree that it is connected with the bourgeoisie via the marketplace and so on is not necessarily an artist's problem.

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