I lack the magnificent richness of color that animates nature.

 Paul Cézanne, French Post-Impressionist painter, 1839-1906

I looked along the San Juan Islands and the coast of California, but I couldn't find the palette of green, granite, and dark blue that you can only find in Maine.

Parker Stevenson, American actor, b1952 

I used to rely on black-and-white, and while I was working on 'Smile,' I learned to adapt to color on my end.

Raina Telgemeier, American cartoonist, b. 1977

I've handled color as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.

Josef Albers, German-born American abstract painter and designer, 1888-1976

To use color well is as difficult as for a fish to pass from water to air or earth.

Andre L’Hote, French cubist painter and sculptor, 1885-1962

Reds, yellows and oranges conjure up sunlight and fire, while the blues and blue-greens evoke snow and ice, sea, sky and moonlight.”

Unknown

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

All the best artists have shown that the greatest achievement in the production of fine color is the concealment of pigments, and not the parade of them; and we may say the same of execution.

Asher B. Durand American Hudson River School painter, 1796-1886

Color… thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.

Charles Baudelaire, French poet, 1821-1867

The last mad throb of red just as it turns green; the ultimate shriek of orange calling all the blues of heaven for relief and support… each color almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself on forming the first rainbow.

Charles Demuth, American Precisionist painter, 1883-1935

Flowers and flames. And color. Color as color, not as volume or light – only as color.

Charles Demuth, American Precisionist painter, 1883-1935

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

See what you can do with your daring with color and your ignorance mixed with it.

Charles Webster Hawthorne, American painter, 1872-1930

At the same time that I’m finding the color world I want, I’m also trying to make the imagery, you know, by the nature of the strokes themselves.

Chuck Close, American painter who achieved fame through his massive-scale portraits, b. 1940

I did some pastels and I did other pieces in which there was just basically one color per square, and then they would get bigger and I could get 2 or 3 colors into the square, and ultimately I just started making oil paintings.

Chuck Close, American painter who achieved fame through his massive-scale portraits, b. 1940

Colors pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep.

Claude Monet, Founder of French Impressionist painting, and prolific practitioner of the movement, 1840-1926

Since the appearance of impressionism, the official salons, which used to be brown, have become blue, green and red.

Claude Monet, Founder of French Impressionist painting, and prolific practitioner of the movement, 1840-1926

I haven’t yet managed to capture the color of this landscape; there are moments when I’m appalled at the colors I’m having to use, I’m afraid what I’m doing is just dreadful and yet I really am understating it; the light is simply terrifying.

Claude Monet, Founder of French Impressionist painting, and prolific practitioner of the movement, 1840-1926

It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colorist. Color becomes significant only when it becomes form.

Clive Bell, English Critic, 1881-1964

A superb membrane of paint is a feast for the eye… applying the colors in transparent layers on an underpainting rather than mixing wet colors.

Cornelis Le Mair, Dutch painter, b. 1944

I don’t know if something can be too colorful. Color is one of the great properties of glass and is more intense in glass than any other material. Imagine entering Chartres Cathedral and looking up at the rose window: you can see a one-inch square of ruby red glass from 300 feet away.

Dale Chihuly, American glassmaker/sculptor and entrepreneur, b. 1941

Ah, Chardin, what you grind on your palette is not this color or that… but the very substance of things. You dip your brush in air and light and spread them on your canvas.

Denis Diderot, French philosopher and writer, 1713-1784

I work in black and white, then go from there.

Deon Venter South African-born Canadian painter, b. 1953

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

Color is a matter of taste and of sensitivity.

Edouard Manet, French realist/Impressionist painter, 1832-1883

I was walking along a road one evening – on one side lay the city, and below me was the fjord. The sun went down – the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming – it seemed as though I could hear a scream. I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood. The colors screamed.

Edvard Munch, Norwegian Symbolist/Expressionist painter, 1863-1944

Colors in vibration, peeling like silver bells and clanging like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death.

Emil Nolde, German Expressionist painter, 1867-1956

The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment’s peace – and even whole-being rejuvenation – by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky.”

Eric Maisel, American author

The mind is excited by what painters refer to as ‘broken color’, the juxtaposition of two or more colors in a single passage.

Eric Wiegardt, American painter

Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. 

Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic painter, 1798-1863

I can paint you the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.”

Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic painter, 1798-1863

The sea a dark greenish blue like a fig.

Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic painter, 1798-1863

Not only can color, which is under fixed laws, be taught like music, but it is easier to learn than drawing, whose elaborate principles cannot be taught.

Eugene Delacroix, French Romantic painter, 1798-1863

Color exists simultaneously with form. Both elements are constantly associated but color strikes you more a rose for instance sometimes form the human body.

Ferdinand Hodler, Swiss Art Nouveau painter, 1853-1918

If you use color carefully, that is, placing a softer ‘off’ color next to pure color, it helps add the magic touch to your work– and that special look.

Gail Boyle, Senior curator based at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

There are always a myriad of color choices that will work in any situation, as long as the tonal value is appropriate.

Gaye Adams, Contemporary Canadian painter

The white canvas– it’s like a layer of dust that covers up the real painting. It’s just a matter of cleaning it. I have a little brush to clear away the blue, another for the red, and another brush for the green. And when I’ve finished cleaning, the picture is all there.

Georges Braque, French cubist/Fauvist painter, 1882-1963

The point is to know how to use the colors, the choice of which is,when all’s said and done, a matter of habit.

Claude Monet, Founder of French Impressionist painting, and prolific practitioner of the movement, 1840-1926

One has to arrive at a specific temperature, at which the objects become malleable.

Georges Braque, French cubist/Fauvist painter, 1882-1963

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

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

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 recognized as the "Mother of American Modernism", 1887-1986

All the earth colors 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

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, Canadian painter, 1933-2004

Color is a plastic means of creating intervals… color harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and color tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony.”

Hans Hofmann, German-born American painter, 1880-1966

Colors must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel.

Hans Hofmann, German-born American painter, 1880-1966

I don’t start with a color order, but find the colors as I go.

Helen Frankenthaler, American Abstract Expressionist painter, 1928-2011

Cutting directly into color reminds me of a sculptor’s carving into stone.

Henri Matisse, French artist, 1869-1954

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michelangelo with color, without tracing its principle.

Henry Fuseli, Swiss-born British Romantic painter, 1741-1825

The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette.

Henry S. Hoskins, Stockbroker and Man of letters, 1875–1957

Truly color is vice! Of course, it can be, and has the right to be one of the finest virtues. Controlled by the strong hand and careful guidance of her Master drawing, color is a splendid Mistress, with a mate worthy of herself, her lover, but her Master likewise, the most magnificent Mistress possible, and the result is evident in all the glorious things that spring from their union.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, U.S.-born British painter of the late 19th century art movement, 1834-1903

The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colors which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, U.S.-born British painter of the late 19th century art movement, 1834-1903

Color confines the totality of elemental work.

Jan Zawadzki, Contemporary American artist

Trying to brighten a dull color is nearly impossible… I start with a color that is too intense so I can calm it as needed.

Jane Jones, Contemporary watercolorist

There is true color, there is nature without exaggeration, without forced brilliance! He is exact.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, French Neoclassical painter, 1780-1867

The West is color. Its colors are animal rather than vegetable, the colors of earth and sunlight and ripeness.

Jessamyn West, American author, 1902-1984

This may sound a bit simple, but the rainbow was my teaching source about mixing color.

Jim Pescott, Contemporary Canadian painter

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, Spanish Surrealist painter and sculptor, 1893-1983

Color can overwhelm… One must understand that when it comes to color, ‘less’ is often ‘more’ – lesson taught us by the masters but ignored by many artists.

Joe Singer, portrait artist

He who wishes to become a master of color must see, feel, and experience each individual color in its endless combinations with all other colors.

Johannes Itten, Swiss Expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer, and theorist, 1888-1967

Good color really means good taste; and ‘powerful’ color means a reserve, to give a climax its full force, and not ‘red, white, and blue all over.

John F. Carlson, Swedish-born American painter, 1875-1945

As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

John Lubbock, collagist, Illustrator and Art Critic, 1957-2011

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

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

I entreat fresh visions from the painters. Be lavish with your vermilion to portray the mountains in the spring.

Lu Xun, Chinese printmaker, 1881-1936

Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid.

Jules Feiffer, American Illustrator, b. 1929

Don’t think of sea as color. Make it a solid that can support a boat. Think of ‘wetness’ as color-texture.

John Sloan, , American painter, etcher and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of American Art, 1871-1951

Form your own color concept of things in nature. I have no rules for fine color to give you.

John Sloan, , American painter, etcher and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of American Art, 1871-1951

To play your colors by eye is worse than playing the piano by ear.

John Sloan, , American painter, etcher and one of the founders of the Ashcan School of American Art, 1871-1951

Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that’s the difference!

Josef Albers, German-born American abstract painter and designer, 1888-1976

Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

Josef Albers, German-born American abstract painter and designer, 1888-1976

I have broken the blue boundary of color limits, come out into the white; beside me comrade-pilots swim in this infinity.

Kasimir Malevich, Ukrainian cubist painter known for the iconic Black Square painting, 1878-1935

I have established the semaphore of Suprematism. I have beaten the lining of the colored sky, torn it away and in the sack that formed itself, I have put color and knotted it. Swim! The free white sea, infinity, lies before you.

Kasimir Malevich, Ukrainian cubist painter known for the iconic Black Square painting, 1878-1935

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 colors and tones… because it was planted so that only the flowers with matching colors will bloom at the same time.

Marcel Proust, French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, 1871-1922

Creators of computer graphics are ahead of painters… Programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop have ‘color pickers’ that present you with a screen full of continuously blended color from which to choose. (Commenting on the color wheel)

Patrick Fanning, Contemporary American painter

Anything can be any color at any time depending on what color everything else is at the time.

Keith Crown, American abstract painter, b. 1918

A variation of edges, along with the proper value, allows the artist to draw attention to or away from different areas of the painting… Likewise, use of color draws attention to an area…

Kenn Backhaus, American painter

Every so often change your palette. Introduce new colors and discard others. You will gain knowledge of color mixing and your work will have added variety.

Kenneth Denton, English painter, b. 1932