Robert Motherwell Quotes

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.

Let's talk about the artist's desire to go beyond the pictorial or the representational and the desire to create the abstract - the idea that painting can go beyond what is seen. What we found is that, increasingly, painting became about paint, its own material truth. When I'm talking about the way that we look at others and the way that we see ourselves increasingly, looking at others becomes its own material truth.

When I see people making 'abstract' painting, I think it's just a dialogue and a dialogue isn't enough. That is to say, there is you painting and this canvas. I think there has to be a third thing; it has to be a trialogue.

Painting is a strange business.

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

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.

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn't have any beginning or any end. He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was.

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.

To move the picture into our surroundings and give it real existence has been my ideal since I came to abstract painting.

In my art, I deconstruct and then I reconstruct, so visual perception is one of my primary interests.

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.

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

My paintings cannot be a negation of what has always been and always will be necessary - drawing and search for values.

Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions.

I have told myself a hundred times that painting - that is, the material thing called a painting - is no more than a pretext, the bridge between the mind of the painter and the mind of the spectator.

If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.

The paintings usually start as abstracts and then I look at them and look at them, and like a Rorschach test, I try and see what it is.

Even with painting, even abstract paintings, you need the incoming of, light on the canvas.

The good thing about painting from memory is that so much is forgotten.

Since childhood, I have been painting, for no special reason, numerous dots and nets, drawing from the hallucinations that seem to appear endlessly. I can't explain why if you ask me.