"Print-making is my hobby, my mistress … When the edition is finally OK, goes to press and you see the first fresh print, it is with ecstasy. All struggle has vanished. There is a virgin birth, fresh and perfect, like Venus arising from the sea. Good prints, properly taken care of, never lose this virgin beauty, like medieval stained glass" In contrast to many of the older generation of Abstract Expressionist artists, like Jackson Pollock, who considered the production of 'painterly prints' to be more or less impossible, one thing that stood Robert Motherwell apart was that he was an accomplished print maker. He disagreed that the spontaneous gesture and freshness of expression, the hallmarks of the Abstract Expressionism, was at odds with the production of prints, just because they were codified and stratified and tied to a  process.  Somehow Motherwell harnessed etching and later lithography and translated them into a means of his own creativity. For Motherwell making prints became a way of liberating his activity in the studio, achieving gestural flourishes and layering disparate elements to form refined compositions. While acknowledging the central importance painting played for him as an artist, Motherwell always expressed his love of making prints .