It is Cezanne's feeling that determined the form of his pictorial structure. It is his pictorial structure that gives off his feeling. If all his pic… - Robert Motherwell

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.

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.

I 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'.