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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the artist's struggle to express complex emotions associated with painting.
Robert Rauschenberg expresses a personal conflict with the commonly held attitudes about art that involve suffering and pain. He indicates that despite these themes often being glorified in the art world, he could not relate to them or make them resonate in his own work, suggesting a different perspective on creativity that does not rely on struggle or anguish.
Themes
ArtExpressionStrugglePainCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about modern art, one could use this quote to highlight the diverse experiences of artists.
More from Robert Rauschenberg
All quotes βI 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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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.
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My art is about paying attention - about the extremely dangerous possibility that you might be art.
Robert RauschenbergRead
The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.
Robert RauschenbergRead
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.
Robert RauschenbergRead
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Maurice Sendak never - I remember he said something that was very striking because it's something I never thought about. I always loved his work, and he said, 'I don't really view myself as a children's book author. I just try and write about childhood as honestly as I can.'
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The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.
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It is in order to really see, to see ever deeper, ever more intensely, hence to be fully aware and alive, that I draw what the Chinese call 'The Ten Thousand Things' around me. Drawing is the discipline by which I constantly rediscover the world. I have learned that what I have not drawn, I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.
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