Very quickly a painting is turned into a facsimile of itself when one becomes so familiar with with it that one recognizes it without looking at it.
Robert RauschenbergRead
I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the complexity of artistic exploration and the limits of single works to express one's full creative vision.
Robert Rauschenberg highlights the challenges artists face in distilling their thoughts and explorations into just one or two pieces of art. He acknowledges that creativity is often a process that requires multiple attempts and iterations to fully capture the depth of ideas and possibilities he wishes to explore.
Themes
ArtCreativityExplorationProcessPainting
In practice
Example use cases
When discussing the creative process in an art class.
More from Robert Rauschenberg
All quotes →I never allowed myself the luxury of those brilliant, beautiful colors until I went to India and saw people walking around in them or dragging them in the mud. I realised they were not so artificial.
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My art is about paying attention - about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art.
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The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.
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There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself in relationship to painting, and that was attitudes like tortured, struggle, pain.
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I don't really trust ideas - especially good ones... Rather, I put my trust in the materials that confront me, because they put me in touch with the unknown.
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I am sometimes accused by my peers of printing my pictures too dark. All I can say is that it goes with the mood of melancholy that is induced by witnessing at close quarters such intractable situations of conflict and joylessness.
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