Quotes & Sayings About Painting Color

Your painting is the marking of your progression into nature, a sensation of something you see way beyond the two pretty colors over there. Don't stop to paint the material, but push on to give the spirit. — Robert Henri

I'm just wowed by the universe. I'm just glad to do something I love to do. I love color, I love painting, I love shapes, I love composition, I love the people around me. I'm adoring it all. My legacy is in the hands of other people. — Peter Max

I like purple too. I looked up color psychology before doing any house painting, because I was curious what the colors I like mean. And purple is very royal and creative. — Paul Dano

Because Guillermo's [del Toro] obviously a painter painting a picture and my job is just to provide the color that he probably already has in his mind. — Charlie Day

A painting is an object which has an emphatic frontal surface. On such a surface, I paint a black band which does not recede, a color band which does not obtrude, a white square or rectangle which does not move back or forth, to or fro, or up or down; there is also a painted white exterior frame band which is edged round the edge to the black. Every part is painted and contiguous to its neighbor; no part is above or below any other part. There is no hierarchy. There is no ambiguity. There is no illusion. There is no space or interval (time). — Jo Baer

After painting comes Sculpture, a very noble art, but one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade, for which the painter has to invent a process, sculpture is helped by nature. Moreover, Sculpture does not imitate color which the painter takes pains to attune so that the shadows accompany the lights. — Leonardo Da Vinci

As an actor, you're a color of paint on someone else's palette. But as a director, it's your canvas and you make the painting you want to make. — Denzel Washington

Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest. — Leonardo Da Vinci

All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of color as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective. — Eugene Delacroix

Color is a language. It is the language of painting. How painting expresses itself is in large part with color. — Joseph Raffael

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point. — Mark Rothko

Such is my relationship with God: on my gigantic canvass of life, I am the one throwing all of the brightly-colored paints, creating genuine splatters, authentic whirlpools of color, beautiful patterns, wonderful streaks and stains and wild accents; God is the one with the paintbrush who stands beside my canvass filling all the intricate and amazing details in between the whirlpools and the streaks! We're happy together! — C. JoyBell C.

A little amateur painting in water colors shows the innocent and the quiet mind. — Robert Louis Stevenson

At first I had some idea that the absence of color made the work more physical. Early on I was very involved with the notion of the painting as an object and tended to attack that idea from different directions. — Jasper Johns

It was then that we connected. His sound bounced through my head and out my eyes, painting my world with new shades of color. I still remember the smile that unnoticeably took my face as I inched for another touch. — Charles Lee

In every motions to put colors on my canvas, I feel like I am screaming, "I AM HERE" ... To whom?.. To where? ... Where am I going to ... ? — Hiroko Sakai

I'm always trying to get to a danger point in color, where color either becomes too sweet or it becomes too harsh, it becomes too noisy or too quiet, and at that point I still want the picture to be strong, forceful, and the carrier of everything that a painting has to have: contrast, drama, austerity. — Wolf Kahn

Matthew's story of the resurrection emphasizes typically Matthean themes, and so on. But this is like what you get when different artists paint portraits of the same person. This painting is certainly a Rembrandt; that is indubitably a Holbein. The touch of the individual artist is unmistakable. And yet the sitter is fully recognizable. The artists have not changed the color of her hair, the shape of his nose, the particular half smile. And when we ask why such stories, so different in many ways and yet so interestingly consistent in these and other features, could have come into existence so early, all the early Christians give the obvious answer: something like this is what happened, even though it was hard to describe at the time and remains mind-boggling thereafter. — N. T. Wright

During college, when I was working full time for my father [the decorator Mark Hampton], I rented an apartment and I just couldn't take time off to paint it. So I went there one evening and stayed up all night painting the place what I thought was a lovely pale yellow. When the sun came up, I realized I'd painted the walls the color of insanity. I had to immediately mix in all my trim color to tone it down. Yellow is an electric color and wholly misleading. It becomes more yellow with the sun's yellow light on it. The moral is, even if you think your yellow is the one, go paler. — Alexa Hampton

I think every painting should be the same size and the same color so they're all interchangeable and nobody thinks they have a better painting or a worse painting ... Besides even when the subject is different, people want the same painting. — Andy Warhol

Many women are singing together of this:
one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
one is at the toll gate collecting,
one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
one is straddling a cello in Russia,
one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,
one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,
one is dying but remembering a breakfast,
one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,
one is wiping the ass of her child,
one is staring out the window of a train
in the middle of Wyoming and one is
anywhere and some are everywhere and all
seem to be singing, although some can not
sing a note. — Anne Sexton

Little by little, I've reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colors. It's not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colors. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things. — Joan Miro

I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it had a kind of patina to it, like copper and bronze and so on. The color I used was a Benjamin Moore color called 2012. My then-young daughter started calling me 2012 - it was my nickname. — Michael Graves

I almost never do drawings, because I have found over the years that doing something in one medium and translating into another doesn't work. I like to conceive a painting in real scale and in color. — Nelson Shanks

Painting is always strongest when in spite of composition, color, etc., it appears as a fact, or an inevitability, as opposed to a souvenir or arrangement. — Robert Rauschenberg

Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors. — Austin O'Malley

Imagine painting all the statues in the world in the color of the sky — Yoko Ono

When we digital artists talk about painting on the computer, that is exactly what we do. The paints we use are pixels, the brush we use is a pressure sensitive pen. The colors are the same as painters use, and how we get to the final image is the same gut wrenching way. — Donald Lambert

Thomas looked like someone's painting of the forgotten Greek god of body cologne. He had long hair so dark that light itself could not escape it, and even fresh from the shower it was starting to curl. His eyes were the color of thunderclouds, and he never did a single moment of exercise to earn the gratuitous amount of ripple in his musculature. He was wearing jeans and no shirt
his standard household uniform. I once saw him answer the door to speak to a female missionary in the same outfit, and she'd assaulted him in a cloud of forgotten copies of The Watchtower. The tooth marks she left had been interesting. — Jim Butcher

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me. — Irving Stone

Music is like creating an emotional painting. The sounds are the colors. — Yanni

We were painting by numbers, starting with the greens. Because that happened to be our favorite color. And this, we figured, had to mean something. — David Levithan

Life is not always what we want it to be, but we can color it any way we like, in order to make it the perfect painting, even when things look rough, there is someone out there who has it worse than us. — Gia Russell

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure. — Aristotle.

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great. — Edward Hopper

The painter knew that color was not something you controlled but something you set free. He believed that color knew its way home. — Thomas Lloyd Qualls

When you want to make the main color pure and bright, don't just keep adding bright colors on it. Just make the colors around the spot darker and dull. It will give the scene dramatical effects.
I think the life is the same. — Hiroko Sakai

Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality. — Irving Stone

Painting is a mosaic of colors weaved into a seamless whole. — Igor Babailov

Of all the arts, abstract painting is the most difficult. It demands that you know how to draw well, that you have a heightened sensitivity for composition and for colors, and that you be a true poet. This last is essential. — Wassily Kandinsky

There is a kinship between music and painting - with the same words used to describe both, as when a musical composition is said to have color and a painting to have rhythm. — Alton Tobey

If painting is no longer needed, it seems a pity that some of us are born into the world with such a passion for line and color. — Mary Cassatt

On and on they flew, over the countryside parceled out in patches of green and brown, over roads and rivers winding through the landscapes like strips of matte and glossy ribbon. — J.K. Rowling

Then very slowly I go to slightly lighter colors until little by little, the forms begin to take shape and I start to see what is happening. Since I never plan in advance, I simply let myself be led by instinct, taste and intuition. And it is in this manner that I find myself creating visions that I have never before imagined. And little by little certain color effects develop that excite me and I find the painting itself leading me on and I become only an instrument of a greater, wiser force ... or being ... or intelligence than I myself am. — Eyvind Earle

The inner life has its soft and gentle beauty; an abstract formlessness as well as a subtle charm. I often consider myself as a figure in a foggy painting: faltering lines, insecure distances, and a merging of greys and blacks. An emotion or a mood - a mere wisp of color - is shaded off and made to spread until it becomes one with all that surrounds it. — Virginia Woolf

As the saturating colors of sun-life fade from sight, the ominous moon reaches out its long arm and applies the dark dyes of night. — Daniel J. Rice

I do not plan any painting, but begin with layers of textures and colors. As I layer the colors, something is suggested to me from within, and that is how it evolves. — Katherine Dunn

The interest and the feelings are not due to colors; the lines of a painting that move us move us even more in a print. — Henri Rousseau

You buy any book on color theory today, and it's just complete poppycock. Everybody comes out of school painting pink, purple and green. The whole damn cartoon industry has pink purple and green on their mind. — John Kricfalusi

Color in painting lures the eyes as verses do in poetry. — Nicolas Poussin

With all its variety and liveliness, color acts in the work of art as blood does as it circulates through our bodies. Color is what keeps the painting alive and moving. — Joseph Raffael

Her color was high and her brown eyes were shining. Her gorgeous red hair was a thick mass of curls that fell down her back. She looked like a painting, fragile, caught in a moment she couldn't get out of. — Sarah Addison Allen

As important as color is to a painting, or wings to a bird. Music injects vibrancy to film and makes it soar! — Gerard De Marigny

It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one. — Philip Guston

Painting is something that takes place among the colors, and one has to leave them alone completely, so that they can settle the matter among themselves. Their intercourse: this is the whole of painting. Whoever meddles, arranges, injects his human deliberation, his wit, his advocacy, his intellectual agility in any way, is already disturbing and clouding their activity. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Consider paint a film of light reflecting/absorbing material, and a colored paint a material which gives a particular, characteristic transmission of light via differential absorption and reflection. Call this reflected quality 'luminance' and measure it in millilamberts. This measure is as real and present as height, breadth, depth; and I find the phenomenon equally sumptuous and convincing ... Painted light, not color, not form, not perspective, or line, not image, or words, or equations, is painting. I make paintings which do not represent light, they are light. — Jo Baer

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. — Roy Lichtenstein

You can eliminate color and still have a painting that works, but you must have drawing, value and design. — Matt Smith

Color corrected, yes, but I am reminding myself that it is still an image worthy of awe." Yoshi is looking at the screen. "Why shouldn't we feel awe? In front of a beautiful painting we do not ask ourselves is it real? We know that it is not real. It is a painting. But we can still be filled with awe at its beauty." It — Meg Howrey

I don't make a lot of distinctions between things like landscape or figure painting, because to me the problems are inherently the same - lighting, color, structure, and so on - certainly traditional and ordinary problems. — Wayne Thiebaud

I know for sure that I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting is in the very marrow of my bones. — Vincent Van Gogh

I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew
the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight.
Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all. — E. E. Cummings

I choose color on the spur of the moment. People ask me why I paint in red. I do not have the slightest idea. I was painting in blue, then I had a need to paint in red. To be able to interact with the medium, this is the key. There are no sure ways to do art. — Guido Molinari

I rarely feel that any of my paintings ever make it to a finishing point. There's always something else I want to add to them, like a few more brushstrokes or another color. But there comes a point with every painting when I just have to stop and accept it for what it is. — Colleen Hoover

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed. — Kazimir Malevich

Often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and color. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much of my writing is verbal painting. — Elizabeth Bowen

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words. — A.S. Byatt

Our right brain hemisphere (transcendent mind) supports us in acknowledging our infinite potential when we understand our true nature and origins, and the importance of our free will. The latter gives us the ability to choose to live like an interdependent whole, within which, we are as musical notes inside a great symphony or the various shades of color in a painting, where our role is as important as that of every component but not better than any other — Ivan Figueroa-Otero

They were wrestling with canvases, using violent colors and huge brush strokes. I arrived with gray, silent, sober, oppressed paintings. One critic said they were paintings that thought. — Antoni Tapies

Opening night is in a week. Already announced to the papers, already sent out in the newsletter in fancy, glossy, full-color glory. Which means I have two days, max, to finish the framing - easily a week's worth of work - and then four days for drilling the star maps I've already marked on the plywood, painting, wiring, installing, and finessing.Leaving me only one day - the day of the evening gala - to clean and get the actual exhibits set up.
It's impossible.
I will make it happen or die trying.
I don't realize I've said that last part aloud until I notice Michelle's horrified face. — Kiersten White

But painting houses wasn't unsatisfying work. You had your good karma jobs, your decent clients. It felt pretty good when you drove away on that last day, paid in full, having restored a little color to someone's shit-brown life. — Wally Lamb

What I have to do is utilize as best I can the ideas which objects suggest to me, connect, fuse, and color in my way the shadows they cast within me, illumine them from the inside. And since of necessity my vision is quite different from that of the next man, my painting will interpret things in an entirely different manner even though it makes use of the same elements. — Pablo Picasso

Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a finely tuned antenna, reacting to very unnoticed movement of the painter's hand, fixing the faintest shadow of a thought in color and texture. — James Elkins

The goal is always to make a nice tableau painting with the voice. The more color I can find, the more shadow I can find - the goal is always to make more nuance and colors. — Cecilia Bartoli

The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black - so that the paint will not get between us and the picture. — Samuel R. Delany

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color. — Piet Mondrian

The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape. — Leonardo Da Vinci

What I could have done in real life only by throwing a bomb which would have led to the scaffold I tried to achieve in painting by using color of maximum purity. In this way I satisfied my urge to destroy old conventions, to disobey in order to re-create a tangible, living, and liberated world. — Maurice De Vlaminck

St. Albert and the LSD Revelation Revolution oil painting by Alex Grey, 2006 color image in the book Net of Being by Alex Grey, 2012 — Rhoney Gissen Stanley

When I'm writing [songs], some days the pen just goes. I'm not in charge and I'm almost listening outside of it. That's when I realize that we all have to start looking at life as a gift. It's like listening to a color and believing that these colors have soul mates and once you get them all together the painting is complete. — Prince

During my youth, I was fascinated by the colors of Van Goth's paintings — Joseph Pisani

My hands are flowing like sunlight. The shapes and colors are astounding. I don't understand these images that are empowering me. My brush touches the canvas like photons to the earth, and a new world develops, free from my control, yet intrinsically dependent upon me. I am sweating with elation. I have no idea what I am doing, or what it is my hands are trying to see. There is so much strength in this clarity I am overpowered by the independence of it. — Daniel J. Rice

When I act, I feel like I am a color in someone else's painting - I can be the best blue that there is, but I'm still only part of their entire picture - but, with music, when I am performing with Reserved For Rondee, I am the painter, you know? — Billy Magnussen

If the seasons bleed into each other like a watercolor painting, it means not enough fish and berries to last the winter, not enough wood chopped for the stove, not enough meat in the freezer. One year winter came so fast and so hard, the leaves on the birch trees didn't even have time to turn yellow and fall off; they froze solid green on the branches. They clung there for months on skinny skeleton arms, the color so blindingly wrong it was creepy. Every year it's a race between the seasons, and that year fall lost. — Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

I kind of do the drawing with the painting in mind, but it's very hard to guess at a size or a color and all the colors around it and what it will really look like. — Roy Lichtenstein

When painting the faces of young persons ... use the yolk of the egg of a city hen, because they have lighter yolks than those of country hens. — Cennino Cennini

I am never in a hurry to reach details. First and above all I am interested in the large masses and the general character of a picture; when these are well established, then I try for subtleties of form and color. I rework the painting constantly and freely, and without any systematic method. — Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

Who speaks of art speaks of poetry. There is not art without a poetic aim. There is a species of emotion particular to painting. There is an effect that results from a certain arrangement of colors, of lights, of shadows. It is this that one calls the music of painting — Edouard Vuillard

But should a sensation from the distant past-like those musical instruments that record and preserve the sound and style of the various artists who played them-enable our memory to make us hear that name with the particular tone it then had for our ears, even if the name seems not to have changed, we can still feel the distance between the various dreams which its unchanging syllables evoked for us in turn. For a second, rehearing the warbling from some distant springtime, we can extract from it, as from the little tubes of color used in painting, the precise tint-forgotten, mysterious, and fresh-of the days we thought we remembered when, like bad painters, we were in fact spreading our whole past on a single canvas and painting it with the conventional monochrome of voluntary memory. — Marcel Proust

Is there a relative value of beauty? Is evanescence - fleetingness - a necessary element of the thing that most moves us? A shooting star dazzles more than the sun. A child captivates like an elf, but grows into grossness, an ogre, a harpy. A flower splays itself into color - the lilies of the field! - more treasured than any painting of a flower. But of all these things, women's grace, shooting stars, flowers, and paintings, only a painting endures. — Gregory Maguire

The most important things in a painting are Form and Value. Color comes last - like a friend you welcome. — Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

I think of painting as possessed by a structure ... but a structure born of the flow of color feeling. — Jules Olitski

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. — John French Sloan

My metaphor for acting in movies - not on stage because it's completely different on stage - is to put colors on an easel for the director to paint his own painting with in the editing room, long after I've left. You buy me for red and black, so I better give you really great red and black, but if I can give you purple, pink, green and brown too, I will. — Scott Glenn

I'm painting color squares. One
square - one color. That's what I paint. — Nigel Tomm

Painting is an unspoken and largely unrecognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods. — James Elkins

In my paintings, the question on whether figures are similar or not is not of any importance, the slightest change of figure or color can create a new painting and it doesn't really matter if a subject is revisited by an artist repeatedly. With enough time in between paintings, an artist can always bring to it something new. — Guity Novin

When you're telling stories, you are actually trying to illuminate some portion of the truth in an artful way. The story may immediately seem to be a lie, but it's like an impressionistic painting - you see the light and the color better than you would with a photo-realistic piece. — Christopher Moore

Mix up a little more shadow color here, then we can put us a little shadow right in there. See how you can move things around? You have unlimited power on this canvas
can literally, literally move mountains — Bob Ross

In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting. — Viggo Mortensen