Robert Motherwell Quotes

I always start a painting with the sky.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

That's when I feel really excited about a painting. When it starts to feel real, when it feels like it has a personality.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

Art is science made clear.

The work of art is always unfaithful to its creator... Art lays at a higher level; it says something more, and almost always, it says something different from what the artist wanted to say.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Yes, I'm very expressive with my painting.

Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.

How do I define a work of art? It is not an asset in the stock-exchange sense, but a man's timid attempt to repeat the miracle that the simplest peasant girl is capable of at any time, that of magically producing life out of nothing.

What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?

I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.

I like the feeling of being able to confront an experience and resolve it as art.

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.

Art is the highest form of hope.

In many ways my paintings are about energy — both in how they are created and the image itself.

In painting, as in the other arts, there's not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.

Art is rearranging and grouping mistakes.

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations.

I don't know what Art is but I know some things it isn't when I see them.

Art is one of the dirtiest words in our language; it's mucked up with all kinds of meanings. There's the art of plumbing; there's the art of almost anything that you can say.

Just trying to live our lives and figuring out how to turn that into art. It's tough to say that the art was premeditated. Instead you just focused on living. 'How do I want to live? What do I want to do?' Then you figured out how to make that into art.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Art is right reason in the doing of work.

If I was an artist, and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.