Saturday, February 20, 2010

Robert Motherwell Wisdom

[caption id="attachment_818" align="aligncenter" width="408" caption="Image by Robert Motherwell, from the Lyric Suite, Ink on Japanese Paper."]Image by Robert Motherwell, from the Lyric Suite, Ink on Japanese Paper.  [/caption]

From "On the 'Lyric Suite.'" 1969, essay excerpted in The Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach, University of California Press, 2007.
"On an impulse one day in a Japanese shop in N.Y.C., where I was buying a toy for a friend's child, I bought 10 packets of 100 sheets each of a Japanese rice paper called "Dragons & Clouds". . .

"Some weeks later--early in April, 1965, it came to me in a flash: PAINT THE THOUSAND SHEETS WITHOUT INTERRUPTION, WITHOUT A PRIORI TRADITIONAL, OR MORAL PREJUDICES OR A POSTERIORIONES, WITHOUT ICONOGRAPHY, AND ABOVE ALL WITHOUT REVISIONS OR ADDITIONS UPON CRITICAL REFLECTION AND JUDGEMENT. GIVE UP ONE'S BEING TO THE ENTERPRISE AND SEE WHAT LIES WITHIN WHATEVER IS IS. VENTURE. DON'T LOOK BACK. DO NOT TIRE. EVERYTHING IS OPEN. BRUSHES AND BLANK WHITE PAPER!"

2 comments:

Joyce Owens said...

Cool. So where are the other 99?

Nancy Charak said...

Good question; where are the other 999? I saw several from this Lyric Suite at the Block Museum at Northwestern and was totally blown way. http://www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu/challenge/index.html My attitude to color has totally changed. I am doing nothing but watercolors one after the other. It#39;s very, very liberating.