Filmed in his studio in 1988, in front of Benoît Jacquot's camera, the painter Robert Motherwell, then aged 73, retraces the main creative stages of his work and describes very precisely his way of working: the importance of the choice of brush , of the support, of the paint used, the accidents which occur and which determine the work... He engages in a discourse on art in the serene atmosphere of his studio in Greenwich. He describes the principles of psychic automatism and comments on the different periods of his work to which dozens of retrospectives, including one in Paris in 1977, have been devoted throughout the world. A rigorous portrait that reveals the painter with his doubts and convictions.