Robert Motherwell Quotes

There is no interruption between my older paintings and my cutouts. Just that with an increasing sense of the absolute, and more abstraction, I have achieved a form that is simplified to its essence.

I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.

I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings.

I've definitely grown and evolved as a person, as an artist, you know. Just in terms of my style, my taste, my influences, everything... That's a part of being an artist I think.

For a hundred years, modern painters, stubbornly and in the face of incessant hostility, have moved, step by step, leaving superb monuments by the wayside, towards an art of arrangement whose expressiveness depends less and less upon its elements imitating the objects of the external world.

I don't want to compare myself to Picasso, but he had four or five periods in his life. Any good artist grows and changes and matures.

It's only when an artist becomes a master that they are fully able to express themselves.

Every artist has to grow, and has to challenge themselves with a new form of expression.

I used to change things in my early paintings to get the nuance or feeling I wanted, but now I plan everything in my head before I do it.

I feel like I introduce another level of my creative ability on every album.

I would like to look back on my body of work and be proud of each record in its own right, but as a whole, I want to continue to grow and move forward.

Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist.

The feeling of an evolution is a constant for every artist who is pursuing the search of refinement and enlargement of his/her own means of expression.

I paint; I draw and paint - I've been doing that since I was in third grade, drawing realistically and then changing to abstract art. That was my first creative thing before guitar or comedy.

As I'm growing, so is my music.

I am my own worst critic, and I look at 'Death Sentence' now, and I go, 'Oh wow, I have really come a long way.' In terms of a filmmaker, I feel like my filmmaking language has really matured.

People forget that, as artists, you are constantly looking to evolve and grow.

I'm always concerned about growing as an artist.

One is never done growing as an artiste. So, it's important to find roles that challenge me and make me learn new things.

I think if you're a creative person, then you're always kinda looking to move things along - 'Where else can I go? Where can I take this?' From painters to photographers - anything creative in the arts - if you're a true artist, I think you'll always look to do something else. 'Where else can I go with it?' Do you know what I mean?

I do not repudiate any of my paintings but there isn't one of them that I would not redo differently, if I had it to redo. My destination is always the same but I work out a different route to get there.

We feel like we're building something aesthetically, so we like the idea of the evolution. So far, each piece of music or everything has been to expand it, instead of backtracking or trying to destroy what we have done.

Each album we [The Replacements] made was the one we were capable of making and wanted to make at the time. Each one was a progression or, depending on your opinion, a sidestep or tumble forward. I don't know what.

I don't have one track that I consider better than the next because all I'm trying to do is still grow as an artist.

If I've grown as an artist, it will be represented in the art. There's no need to explain it.