Color Quotes Graphics: O'Keefe to Reid
“Whether the flower or the color is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower – and what is my experience if it is not the color?” -- Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter recognized as the "Mother of American modernism", 1887-1986
Image credit: Georgia O'Keeffe [Public domain]
“The meaning of a word — to me — is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words.” -- Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter recognized as the "Mother of American modernism", 1887-1986
Image credit: Sensational Color
“All the earth colours of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands.” -- Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter recognized as the "Mother of American modernism", 1887-1986
Image credit: Sensational Color
“I don’t think of myself as a ‘colorist’; I look at myself as a value painter. While I paint I do not think directly of what colors I wish to use… rather I think of temperature.” -- Don O’Neill, American Artist, b. 1924
Image credit: Sensational Color
“If time were a color, I bet it would be a tasteful off-white.” -- Greg Parrish, American Illustrator, 1870-1966
Image credit: DAVIDCOHEN
“Colour is as variable and evanescent in the form of pigment as in visible nature,” -- Walter J. Phillips, Canadian Painter, 1884-1963
Image credit: Sensational Color
“I want to know one thing. What is color?” -- Pablo Picasso, Spanish Cubist Painter and Sculptor, 1881-1973I
mage credit: Sensational Color
“A smart walk through a gallery from a fifteenth century to a sixteenth century, and then a seventeenth century room will reveal how in successive centuries the brilliancy of oil picture diminishes.” -- Arthur Pillans Laurie, Scottish Chemist and Principal of Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh, 1861-1949
Image credit: Gabriël Metsu Public Domain
“The glories and the beauties of form, color, and sound unite in the Grand Canyon – forms unrivaled even by the mountains, colors that vie with sunsets, and sounds that span the diapason from tempest to tinkling raindrop, from cataract to bubbling fountain.” -- John Wesley Powell American Explorer, 1834-1902
Image credit: Sensational Color
“My personal theory is that being frugal with the number of colours, one gets to know them intimately and to understand how each reacts with the others.” -- Ron Ranson, English Artist, Teacher and Author
Image credit: Sensational Color
“I know I can not paint a flower. I can not paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning but maybe in terms of paint color I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time.” -- Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter recognized as the "Mother of American modernism", 1887-1986
Image credit: Sensational Color
“The feeling that a person gives me that I cannot say in words comes in colors and shapes.” -- Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter recognized as the "Mother of American modernism", 1887-1986
Image credit: Sensational Color
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.” -- Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter recognized as the "Mother of American modernism", 1887-1986
Image credit: Sensational Color
“I mix them with my brains, sir.” (His response when asked what he mixed his colors with) -- John Opie, Cornish Historical and Portrait Painter, 1761-1807
Image credit: Sensational Color
“Each colour is applied to the canvas in relation to the colours next to it. The painting becomes a living thing and calls out for the colour it wants.” -- Neil Patterson, Canadian Painter, b. 1947
Image credit: Sensational Color
“In painting, whether colour reflection is apparent or not, every hue must echo neighbouring hues, so that homogeneity may be attained.” -- Walter J. Phillips, Canadian Painter, 1884-1963
Image credit: Sensational Color
“When I haven’t any blue I use red.” -- Pablo Picasso, Spanish Cubist Painter and Sculptor, 1881-1973
Image credit: Sensational Color
“I find great pleasure in using color out of context to express emotion and to entertain the viewer.” ~ Carlton Plummer American Painter, 20th Century
Image credit: Sensational Color
“If I can someday see M. Claude Monet’s garden, I feel sure that I shall see something that is not so much a garden of flowers as of colours and tones… because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colours will bloom at the same time.” -- Marcel Proust, French Intellectual, Novelist, Essayist and Critic, 1871-1922
Image credit: Sensational Color
“The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.” ~Odilon Redon French Symbolist Painter, 1840-1916
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“There’s something about black. You feel hidden away in it.” -- Georgia O’Keeffe, American painter recognized as the "Mother of American modernism", 1887-1986
Image credit: Sensational Color
“Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world — life as I see it.” -- Georgia O’Keeffe, American Painter, 1887-1986
Image credit: Sensational Color
“My mother warned me to avoid things coloured red.” ~ Claes Oldenburg Swedish-born American Pop Sculptor, b. 1929
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“To achieve depth the colour has to penetrate the paper.” -- Shanti Panchal, Indian Painter
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“This may sound a bit simple, but the rainbow was my teaching source about mixing color.” -- Jim Pescott, Contemporary Canadian Painter
Image credit: Sensational Color
“It is the sense of unfamiliar envelopment that is impressive, whether in the living grays of hoarfrost, the crimson of the heavens at sunset, or the golden suffusions of autumn” -- Walter J. Phillips, Canadian Painter, 1884-1963
Image credit: Sensational Color
“Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No.” -- Pablo Picasso, Spanish Cubist Painter and Sculptor, 1881-1973
Image credit: Sensational Color
“Colors in painting are as allurements for persuading the eyes, as the sweetness of meter is in poetry.” -- Nicolas Poussin, French Baroque Era Painter, 1594-1665
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“At a certain point the well-versed musician does not need to think of the keys, where they are located, or which scale or sequence of notes will recall a certain mood… The artisan can think of the palette as an instrument with each of the colors representing a different note on the keyboard.” -- Stephen Quiller, American Artist, Author and Teacher, b.1946
Image credit: Sensational Color
“Partially mixed colors, mixed on the paper, are more interesting than thoroughly mixed colors from the palette’s mixing area.” -- Charles Reid American Painter, b. 1937
Image credit: Sensational Color
