Carolina QuotesYou let the brush take over and in a way follow its own head, and in the brush doing what it's doing, it will stumble on what one couldn't by oneself.. .It's essential to fracture influences in the same way that free association in psychoanalysis helps to fracture one's social self-deceptions.
Robert Motherwell Connected to the Carolinas
Source
Quote, as cited by Grace Glueck, in 'Robert Motherwell, Master of Abstract, Dies', by Grace Glueck, 'New York Times, 18 July 1991 — Motherwell's description of the surrealist method of psychic automatism, or 'artful scribbling', as he called it and applied it always. It involved a kind of 'free association' in which the pen or brush was allowed to wander on the surface, free from and not directed by the conscious mind
- work
- Undated
- year
- 1991
Cite this record
“You let the brush take over and in a way follow its own head…” Robert Motherwell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-4F48681C1B. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/4f48681c1b
More from Robert Motherwell
Nothing as drastic an innovation as abstract art could have come in to existence, save as the consequence of a most profound, relentless, unquenchable need. The need is for felt experience - intense, immediate, direct, subtle, unified, warm, vivid, rhythmic.
Here we are at the antipode of automatism [invention from Surrealism] and mechanism, and no less distant from the cunning way of reason. In the action of the machine, in which everything is repeated and predetermined, accident is an abrupt negation.. .. [the] excess of ink flowing capriciously in thin black rivulets.. ..this line deflected by a sudden jar, this drop of water diluting a contour – all these are the sudden invasion of the unexpected in a world where it has a right to its proper place. [Motherwell is quoting here the comments of w:Henri Focillon on Japanese legends of 'accidentalism']
When I first saw the work of Matisse I knew that was for me.