Robert Motherwell Quotes

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.

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.

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.

Painting is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

I paint when I cannot photograph.

People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand--what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for--Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

When I begin, theoretically and practically I can smear anything I want on the canvas. Then there's a condition I have to react to, by changing it or destroying it.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

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.

Recording a scene with paint rather than film sinks you more deeply into your surroundings. You have to look a little harder and a little longer. And you end up with a memento.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

I still take photographs for my own use, personal studies. I do not feel that I can fully express my views through the medium and this is why I have moved towards painting.

Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting.

To put what you see on paper is the same as funneling what you feel through yourself as a performer.

When I work, I'm thinking in terms of purely visual effects and relations, and any verbal equivalent is something that comes afterwards. But it's inconceivable to me that I could experience things and not have them enter into my painting.

It was only after I began to write fiction that I found a way to connect with painting.

I'm an artist who works with pictures and words. Sometimes that stuff ends up in different kinds of sites and contexts which determine what it means and looks like.

I don't want to be a film-maker. I think painting is far more exciting and profound.

I came to feel an artist might use anything - a dot, a line, the most conventional or unconventional symbol - t say what he wanted to say.

Painting is a language of its own. You cannot interpret one form of expression with another form of expression.

Sometimes I write what I can't paint, and I paint what I can't write. I use a different part of the brain.