“In my case, I find a blank canvas so beautiful that that to work immediately, in relation to how beautiful the canvas is as such, is inhibiting and, for me, demands 'too much to quickly'; so that my tendency is to get the canvas 'dirt', so to speak, in one way or another, and then, so to speak 'work in reverse', and try to bring it back to an equivalent of the original clarity and perfection of the canvas, that one began on…”

— Robert Motherwell

as cited in Abstract Expressionism, Creators and Critics, ed. Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 111
1960s, Interview with David Sylvester', (1960)

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Robert Motherwell 42

American artist 1915–1991

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“It's like this - you are in front of your canvas, you hand holds the paint, ready, raised. The canvas waits, waits, empty and white - but all the time it knows what it wants. So - what does it want, anyway? My hand comes near, my eyes begin to transform the waiting canvas; and when - with my hands holding the paint and my eyes seeing the forms - I touch the canvas, it trembles, it comes to life.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Karel Appel's excerpt', c. 1953

“All my life I've been working on the work - every canvas a sentence or paragraph of it. Each picture is only an approximation of what you want. That's the beauty of being an artist; you can never make the absolute statement, but the desire to do so as an approximation keeps you going.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

as cited by Grace Glueck, in 'Robert Motherwell, Master of Abstract, Dies', by Grace Glueck, 'New York Times, 18 July 1991 https://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/18/obituaries/robert-motherwell-master-of-abstract-dies.html
Undated

“Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

Source: 1930s, On my Painting (1938), pp. 18-19

“I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting. After looking comes imitating. In my own case it was at first largely a technical immersion. How did Kline put down that color? Why did Guston leave the canvas bare at the edges? Why did H. Frankenthaler used unsized canvas. And so on.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, The Pratt lecture (1960), p. 113

“My painting, at the limit, can only signify itself… It is. So much so, and so well, that anyone can make it and claim it… Perhaps the only thing that one can do after having seen a canvas like ours is total revolution.”

Daniel Buren (1938) sculptor from France

Daniel Buren in an 1968 interviewer, cited in: Andrew Russeth, " Daniel Buren Shows His Stripes: The Celebrated Artist’s Two-Gallery Show Is On, After a Sandy Delay http://observer.com/2013/01/daniel-buren-shows-his-stripes-the-celebrated-artists-two-gallery-show-is-on-after-a-sandy-delay/#ixzz3bQq73uPq." at observer.com, 01/08/13
1960s

“All is so calm and chaste, so like a dream.
That looking at this masterpiece of God, I ask myself
Where is there a painter, an artist so supreme,So profoundly wise as to unfurl
A canvas with a more arresting scene,
More delicate and beautiful in this World?”

Florbela Espanca (1894–1930) Portuguese poet

Tudo é tranquilo e casto e sonhador...
Olhando esta paisagem que é uma tela
De Deus, eu penso então: Onde há pintor<p>Onde há artista de saber profundo,
Que possa imaginar coisa mais bela,
Mais delicada e linda neste Mundo?
Juvenilia: versos inéditos de Florbela Espanca (1946), p. 56
Translated by John D. Godinho
Juvenília (1931), No meu Alentejo

“.. so before I died I wanted to paint a large canvas that I had worked out in my head, and all month long I worked [on Tahiti] day and night at fever pitch... It's all done without a model.”

Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) French Post-Impressionist artist

late quote about the start of his famous large painting 'Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going'
Source: 1890s - 1910s, The Writings of a Savage (1996), pp. 159-160: in a letter from Tahiti to a friend, 1898

“At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

"The American Action Painters" (1952) in Art News 51/8, Dec. 1952, p. 22; then published in Tradition of the New, 1959.

“[My own goal is] to be completely empty of ideas at the moment of setting brush to canvas, the head being just as empty as the canvas.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

In a conversation with Pierre Loeb, circa 1946; as quoted on the website of the Jorn Museum 'Articles' by Jorn http://www.museumjorn.dk/en/article_presentation.asp?AjrDcmntId=255,
1940 - 1948, Various sources

“If upon a white canvas I jot down some sensations of blue, of green, of red – every new brush stroke diminishes the importance of the preceding ones. Suppose I set out to paint an interior... If I paint a green near the red, if I paint in a yellow floor, there must still be between this green, this yellow, and the white of the canvas a relation that will be satisfactory to me. But these several tones mutually weaken one another. It is necessary, therefore, that the various elements that I use be so balanced that they do not destroy one another..”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

Source: 1905 - 1910, Notes d'un Peintre' (Notes of a Painter) (1908), p. 411

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