Rauschenberg Quotes

“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.”

“You begin with the possibilities of the material.”

“An empty canvas is full.”

“The artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history.”

“So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design.”

“You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.”

“Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made - I try to act in the gap.”

“I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'”