Carolina QuotesI begin [a painting] from an impulse, an intense and irrational desire that takes you over, prompting you to start moving. And from experience, with some knowledge of what moves oneself, I think it's not altogether arbitrary what one begins with.. ..certainly implicit partially is the feeling, not that 'I am going to paint something I know' by 'through the act of painting I'm going to find out exactly how I feel'.
Robert Motherwell Connected to the Carolinas
Source
as cited in Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111
- form
- interview
- work
- 'Interview with David Sylvester', (1960)
- year
- 1960
- locator
- p. 111
Cite this record
“I begin [a painting] from an impulse, an intense and irratio…” Robert Motherwell. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E48F14A65E. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e48f14a65e
More from Robert Motherwell
One cuts and chooses and shifts and pastes, and sometimes tears off and begins again.
..a plastic weapon with which to invent new forms.. [remark in 1951 on the concept of automatism ].
The passions are a kind of thirst, inexorable and intense, for certain feelings or felt states. To find or invent 'objects' (which are, more strictly speaking, relational structures) whose felt quality satisfies the passions,- that for me is the activity of the artist, an activity which does not cease even in sleep. No wonder the artist is constantly placing and displacing, relating and rupturing relations; his task is to find a complex of qualities whose feeling is just right – veering toward the unknown and chaos, yet ordered and related in order to be apprehended.