Colour Quotes

Ceiling of the Paris Opera, 1963

“In our life there is a single colour, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the colour of love.” ~ Marc Chagall

“Colour has always got something mysterious about it that cannot be properly understood… Colours are the most irrational element in painting. They have something suggestive about them, a suggestive power…” ~ Paul Klee

“Colour is a means of exerting a direct influence on the soul. Colour is a keyboard, the eyes, the hammers and the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another purposively to cause vibrations in the soul.” ~ Wassily Kandinsky

“Above all keep your colours fresh!” ~ Edouard Manet

“They’ll sell you thousands of greens. Veronese green and emerald green and cadmium green and any sort of green you like; but that particular green, never.” ~ Pablo Picasso

Place Clichy (Bouvet 88; Roger-Marx 77) 1922

“You reason colour more than you reason drawing… Colour has a logic as severe as form.” ~ Pierre Bonnard

“Colour does not add a pleasant quality to design—it reinforces it.” ~ Pierre Bonnard

The Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908 

“Colour helps to express light, not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist’s brain.” ~ 
Henri Matisse

“There is a logic of colours, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.” ~ Paul Cezanne

“We get used to a certain kind of colour of form or format, and it’s acceptable. And to puncture that is sticking your neck out a bit. And then pretty soon, that’s very acceptable.” ~ Lee Krasner

“Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” ~ Claude Monet

No.9 (Dark over Light Earth), 1954

“I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of colour or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” ~ Mark Rothko

“Colour is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that colour has with forms, and the statement you're trying to make.” ~ Roy Lichtenstein

“In visual perception a colour is almost never seen as it really is —as it physically is. This fact makes colour the most relative medium in art.” ~ Josef Albers

“The craving for colour is a natural necessity just as for water and fire. Colour is a raw material indispensable to life. At every era of his existence and his history, the human being has associated colour with his joys, his actions and his pleasures.” 
~ Frenand Leger

“Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of colour to express myself more forcefully… To express the love of two lovers by the marriage of two complementary colours…To express the thought of a brow by the radiance of a light tone against a dark background. To express hope by some star. Someone's passion by the radiance of the setting sun.” ~
 Vincent van Gogh

Suaire de Mondo Cane, 1961

“Colour is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state.” ~ Yves Klein

“In nature, light creates the colour. In the picture, colour creates the light.” ~ Hans Hofmann

“Art is harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and of similar elements of tone, of colour and of line, conditioned by the dominate key, and under the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations.” ~ Georges Seurat

“We were always intoxicated with colour, with words that speak of colour, and with the sun that makes colours live.” ~ Andre Derain

Pink Tulip, 1926

“I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn't say any other way—things I had no words for.”  ~ Georgia O'Keeffe