Color Quotes Graphics: Renoir to Shahn
“I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn’t turn out that way, I add more reds and other colors until I get it.” -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir French Impressionist Painter, 1841-1919
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“With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today… what they did was sounder.” -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir, French Impressionist Painter, 1841-1919
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“The distinct blue, red, and yellow colors… though they have not the kind of harmony which is produced by a variety of broken and transparent colors, have the effect of grandeur.” ~Sir Joshua Reynolds English Rococo Era Painter, 1723-1792
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“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, German Poet, 1875–1926
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“If you… are moved only by the color relationships, then you miss the point.” ~Mark Rothko Latvian-born American Abstract Expressionist Painter, 1903-1970
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“The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect.” -- John Ruskin, leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also a watercolourist, draughtsman, an art patron, and a prominent social thinker and philanthropist., 1819-1900
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“The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the color which common sense says they ‘really’ have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear.” -- Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher, 1872-1970
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“Color is so much a matter of direct and immediate perception that any discussion of theory needs to be accompanied by experiments with the colors themselves.” -- Walter Sargent American Painter, 1868-1927
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“Such a magnificent sky, and it’s nothing but white paper!” -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir French Impressionist Painter, 1841-1919
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“With all their damned talk of modern painting, I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black!” -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir French Impressionist Painter, 1841-1919
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“Colours are promiscuous. They get infected by their neighbors.” ~Paul Richard, Contemporary American Street Artist
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“Now colour… is the flower of fine modelling. These two qualities always accompany each other, and it is these qualities which give to every masterpiece of the sculptor the radiant appearance of living flesh.” -- Auguste Rodin French Sculptor, 1840-1917
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“Blue color is everlastingly appointed by the deity to be a source of delight.” -- John Ruskin, leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also a watercolourist, draughtsman, an art patron, and a prominent social thinker and philanthropist., 1819-1900"
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“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.” -- John Ruskin, leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also a watercolourist, draughtsman, an art patron, and a prominent social thinker and philanthropist., 1819-1900
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“Color and light must be entirely melted into one and felt as such – and light must be expressed as it is felt as color.” -- Morgan Russell, American Painter, 1886-1953
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“I plan colors ahead of time only in a general sense. I have found that if I try to force the paint to do what I want, I miss valuable input from the watercolor process. As a result, the colors grow and change as the painting grows and changes.” -- Carol Ann Schrader, Contemporary Watercolor Artist
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“White does not exist in nature.” -- Pierre-Auguste Renoir French Impressionist Painter, 1841-1919
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“Perhaps blue, red, and yellow strike the mind more forcibly from there not being any great union between them, as martial music, which is intended to rouse the nobler passions…” ~ Sir Joshua Reynolds English Rococo Era Painter, 1723-1792
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“The image begins to tell me what mood it’s in – happy, sad – which tells me what colors to use and how to continue.” -- Ruth B. Rieber, American Artist
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“Color is but a sensation and has no existence outside the nervous system of living beings.” ~Nicholas Ogden Rood American Physicist , 1831-1902
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“Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.” -- John Ruskin, leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also a watercolourist, draughtsman, an art patron, and a prominent social thinker and philanthropist., 1819-1900
Image credit: Sensational Color
“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.” -- John Ruskin, leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also a watercolourist, draughtsman, an art patron, and a prominent social thinker and philanthropist., 1819-1900
Image credit: Sensational Color
“I sometimes use a lot of light greens and greys when I feel there is sadness in the painting.” -- Robert Ryan American Actor, 1909-1973
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“How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black.” -- Ben Shahn, Lithuanian-born American Social Realist Painter and Photographer, 1898-1969
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