Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwellwas an American painter, printmaker, and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School, which also included Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth24 January 1915
CountryUnited States of America
children flower giving
If you give a child something very complex to paint, such as a bouquet of flowers or a natural landscape, if he is very good, eventually he will get back - like Cezanne - to the essential forms of what he sees.
opposites trying painting
I started with straight, basic, symbolic structures. My problem now is the opposite; as I get older, I try to make my paintings more contrapuntal, richer.
incentives paint poor
Any incentive to paint is as good as any other. There is no poor subject.
dream order perception
Sometimes images may emerge from some chord in my subconscious, the way a dream might. Even in those paintings where an image unconsciously develops, a certain kind of experience is usually necessary in order to perceive it.
self mediums subjects
A subject emerges from an interaction between my self, my I, and my medium.
power size different
It's possible to paint a monumental picture that's only 10 inches wide, if one has a sense of scale, which is very different from a sense of size.
writing people tasks
By far the most common task for which the machines are used is writing - or word processing, as it's known to the same people who call journalism 'content.
anxiety abstract-painting common
I never had the... common anxiety as to whether abstract painting had a given 'meaning.
artist drawing vision
In printmaking, I essentially use the same process as in painting with one important exception ... to try, with sensitivity to the medium to emphasize what printing can do best ... better than say, painting or collaging or watercolour or drawing or whatever ... Otherwise, the artist expresses the same vision in graphics that he does in his other work.
everyday world way
For a painter as abstract as myself, the collages offer a way of incorporating bits of the everyday world into pictures.
choices decision
Each brushstroke is a decision.
wine blood glasses
The 'pure' red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters' caps and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling toward red and its relations...
wine mean simple
In a way, painting is like wine: it is as old, as simple, as primitive and as varied. Like wine, it is a very specific means of expression, with a limited vocabulary, but vast in its expressive potential.
wine labels letters
To pick up a cigarette wrapper or wine label or an old letter or the end of a carton is my way of dealing with those things that do not originate in me, in my I.