Mugabi Motherwell Quotes

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

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

One of the most striking of abstract art's appearances is her nakedness, an art stripped bare. ~ Robert Motherwell

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. ~ Robert Motherwell

The main thing is not to be dead. ~ Robert Motherwell

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

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

I almost never start with an image. I start with a painting idea, an impulse, usually derived from my own world. ~ Robert Motherwell

Art is an experience, not an object. ~ Robert Motherwell

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

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

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

Every picture one paints involves not painting others. ~ Robert Motherwell

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

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

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. ~ 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

Collage is the twentieth century's greatest innovation ~ Robert Motherwell

I feel most real to myself in the studio. ~ 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

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. ~ Robert Motherwell

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

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

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

The 'pure' red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters' caps and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling toward red and its relations ... ~ Robert Motherwell

Wherever art appears, life disappears. ~ Robert Motherwell

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

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

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. ~ Robert Motherwell

How's my mom? My mother's well, like a painting - a Motherwell. ~ Jarod Kintz

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. ~ Robert Motherwell

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

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

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