Robert Motherwell Quotes

I'm a sponge, the more I absorb, the more I am able to articulate my vision, as artists do, like Picasso. I'm an artist in that light. I went from being an artist to an artiste.

I dreamed of being an artist.

An artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes.

The artist's conception of his art or the scientist's of his science is usually as great as his conception of his own worth is small.

The way an actor is trained doesn't ultimately have much bearing on my work. I'm interested in the actor as artist.

Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.

The artist does not really create; he discovers.

We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music.

The artist begins with a vision - a creative operation requiring an effort.

Working with the artist elite can be like banging your head against the wall.

A necessary process for the artist is one which begins with a point of view, a reaction to the environment, to people, to whatever it is one is concerned with.

great artists can be uncertain. Of course they are while strugggling to find solutions. Tolstoi's scripts are almost indecipherable. Emily Dickinson provided four or more alternates for every word; Beethoven wrestled with endings to the point of exhaustion; in our day Jerome Robbins and his lack of decision are a byword in the dance profession. But all of these knew very well what they did not want, and what they did not want was the current coin, the well-worn usage. What they wanted was something newly experienced, and therefore unknown and hard to attain.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

The mind of an artist, in order to achieve the prodigious effort of freeing whole and entire the work that is in him, must be incandescent...there must be no obstacle in it, no foreign matter unconsumed.

I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.

The artist’s memory is a dangerous, necessary thing. Never disavow what you see and remember-it’s your brilliant stock-in-trade: remembering, and making something out of it. Artists remember the world as it is, first, because you have to know what it is you’re reinventing; that’s a rule, perhaps the only one: being cognizant of your source material.

A great artist has a unique vision...obsession. They are someone willing to fail flamboyantly.

All poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.

As an artist I have always tried to be faithful to my vision of life, and I have frequently been in conflict with those who wanted me to paint not what I saw but what they wished me to see.

A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves. They've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

A distinction is made between artists who work directly from nature and those who work purely from imagination. Neither if these methods should be preferred to the exclusion of the other. Often both are used in turn by the same man.

It [lighting the set up] is quite a process. It's like drawing. It's like being an artist. You pencil it in first, and then you ink it. When you're filming, it's like you're penciling it all in. You know where everything is going to go. But, that application of the final ink takes some time.

For me going solo meant freedom to collaborate and do whatever I feel I'm good at doing. For me it was really not ever expanding as an artist, developing everything from my songwriting to my singing to my mission statement to my vision. I've been so inspired by all the creative freedom that it brings that I have no complaints.