Carolina QuotesFeeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in the same way, thought must have symbols. It is the medium, or the specific configuration of the medium that we call a work of art that brings feeling into being, just as do responses tot the objects of the external world.. .The medium of painting is such changing and ordering on an ideal plane, ideal in that the medium is more tractable, subtle, and capable of emphasis (abstraction is a kind of emphasis) than everyday life.
Robert Motherwell Connected to the Carolinas
Source
pp. 38-39
- work
- 'Beyond the Aesthetics' (1946)
- year
- 1946
- locator
- pp. 38-39
Cite this record
“Feeling must have a medium in order to function at all; in t…” Robert Motherwell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-D819BEF77A. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/d819bef77a
More from Robert Motherwell
I believe that painter's judgments of painting are first ethical, then aesthetic, the aesthetic judgments flowing from an ethical context. Doubtless no painter systematically thinks this way; but it does seem to me to be basically what happens when modern painters judge any new manifestations of painting.. .An artist's 'art' is just his consciousness, developed slowly and painstakingly with many mistakes en route. How dare they collect those ugly early Van Gogh's like trophies...
I take an elegy to be a funeral lamentation or funeral song for something one cared about. The 'Spanish Elegies' [his most famous series of paintings, related to the Spanish Civil War] are not 'political' but my private insistence that a terrible death happened that should not be forgot. They are as eloquent as I could make them. But the pictures are also general metaphors of the contrast between life and death and their interrelation.
..a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms.. [remark in 1951 on the concept of automatism ].