Robert Motherwell Quotes

If you want to paint the inner life, you paint it from the exterior. From the exterior, you breathe the inner life into your painting.

By painting colors and lines and forms seen in quickened mood I was seeking to make this mood vibrate as a phonograph does. This was the origin of the paintings in The Frieze of Life.

Abstract art is only painting. And what's so dramatic about that? There is no abstract art. One must always begin with something. Afterwards one can remove all semblance of reality; there is no longer any danger as the idea of the object has left an indelible imprint.

In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.

This truth must be recognized as a dogma and assume the validity of an axiom in the general understanding of painting.

At that point it certainly would be called abstract. That is to say, you had a model and there'd be one or two or three people there drawing the model but otherwise you had abstractions all around the room, even though the model was in front of you.

I think when somebody's painting they don't necessarily... I'm not illustrating what I know. I'm mapping out, like topographically, some terrain I am satisfied with, how awkward that mark is.

I'll take anything and slap it on a canvas.

We don't sell technical drawings except when they are incorporated into a drawing or a collage.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

Picasso took scraps of wallpaper, and instead of using paint and a brush, he used all the existing elements which he made his artwork with.

I love taking elements and colours from nature and then distorting them somehow.

I suppose I consider my work a kind of picture making.

Once my paintings are complete, the model no longer lives in the painting as themselves. I see something bigger, more symbolic - an archetype.

I paint the way I spread butter on pumpernickel.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

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.

Painting demands an intelligent model.

If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.

Modern pictures banish depiction for interfering with the workings of paint.

For me, drawing is everything, because it informs everything. It even informs my poetry. It's the way I begin everything.

I want to make portraits and images. I don't know how. Out of despair, I just use paint anyway. Suddenly the things you make coagulate and take on just the shape you intend. Totally accurate marks, which are outside representational marks.