73 Quotes by Robert Motherwell

To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.

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.

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.

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.

The abstractness of modern art has to do with how much an enlightened mind rejects of the contemporary social order.

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.

The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?

I dislike a picture that is too suave or too skilfully done. But, contrariwise, I also dislike a picture that looks too inept or blundering.

Every picture one paints involves not painting others.