Top 100 Color Painting Quotes
#1. Painting is a mosaic of colors weaved into a seamless whole.
Igor Babailov
#2. I started when I was nine. Really, everything I know about color theory, composition, drawing, and painting, I learned when I was a kid.
David Salle
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. In a movie, you're raw material, just a hue of some color and the director makes the painting.
Viggo Mortensen
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Style in painting is the same as in writing,-a power over materials, whether words or colors.
James Ellis
#14. Color in painting lures the eyes as verses do in poetry.
Nicolas Poussin
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. The first degree of proficiency is, in painting, what grammar is in literature, a general preparation for whatever the student may afterward choose for more particular application. The power of drawing, modeling, and using colors, is very properly called the language of the art.
Joshua Reynolds
#18. 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
#19. Colors in painting are as allurements for persuading the eyes, as the sweetness of meter is in poetry.
Nicolas Poussin
#20. 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
#21. I think of painting as possessed by a structure ... but a structure born of the flow of color feeling.
Jules Olitski
#22. 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
#23. We speak of concrete and not abstract painting because nothing is more concrete, more real than a line, a color, a surface.
Theo Van Doesburg
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Painting dissolves the forms at its command ... it melts them into color.
Alexander Eliot
#28. 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
#29. If you stand too close to a painting - all you see are patches of color, if you stand too far back, you can't see any of the detail.
Mandy Patinkin
#30. 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
#31. 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.
#32. 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
#33. The most important things in a painting are Form and Value. Color comes last - like a friend you welcome.
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
#34. The older I get, the more I feel that color is what painting is. Painting is primarily color.
Joseph Raffael
#35. Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.
Roy Lichtenstein
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. There are people who don't respond to color. That's what painting is. It's color.
Larry Poons
#39. Sometimes their oppression of emotion and the weird way it comes out is more interesting than painting it in bold primary colors.
Edward Norton
#40. Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.
Lincoln Kirstein
#41. 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
#42. In the landscape, colors are more neutral than you may think. Pay close attention to this. Small areas of rich color can make the whole painting look colorful.
Matt Smith
#45. When we are writing, or painting, or composing, we are, during the time of creativity, freed from normal restrictions, and are opened to a wider world, where colors are brighter, sounds clearer, and people more wondrously complex than we normally realize.
Madeleine L'Engle
#46. I don't work from drawings. I don't make sketches and drawings and color sketches into a final painting.
Jackson Pollock
#47. 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
#48. You can eliminate color and still have a painting that works, but you must have drawing, value and design.
Matt Smith
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. A color which would be 'dirty' if it were the color of a wall, needn't be so in a painting.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#56. 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
#57. Music is like creating an emotional painting. The sounds are the colors.
Yanni
#58. Prose is a photography, poetry is a painting in oil-colors.
Austin O'Malley
#59. 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
#60. If light is the spiritual quality of painting, color is surely its heart and passion.
Robert Reynolds
#61. Making a movie is, for me, like painting. I just enjoy the care that goes into every brushstroke and the choice of every color. I enjoy the intensity of it.
Abbie Cornish
#62. The subtle hues of gold and yellow and the fresh greens and the pepper red seemed to spiral into a kaleidoscope of shapes and forms that made the tips of a person's toes tingle, so that some were inclined to remove their shoes in its presence.
Jeffry R. Halverson
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I'm painting color squares. One
square - one color. That's what I paint.
Nigel Tomm
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. During my youth, I was fascinated by the colors of Van Goth's paintings
Joseph Pisani
#73. Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.
Kazimir Malevich
#74. I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.
Willem De Kooning
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Imagine painting all the statues in the world in the color of the sky
Yoko Ono
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. As music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight and the subject-matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or of color.
James Whistler
#82. Values create dimension, but color usually receives all of the attention. When painting with oils, placing dark and light pigments next to each other can be an accident waiting to happen.
Robert Warren
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. Painting as it is now promises to become more subtle - more like music and less like sculpture - and above all it promises color. If only it keeps this promise.
Vincent Van Gogh
#87. For example, in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents - as an element - the greatest difficulty in manipulation.
Sergei Eisenstein
#88. 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
#89. Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors ... painting, because artists' pigments are made from fluids ... mixed together with powdered stones to give color ... and the other is alchemy, the stone the ultimate goal.
James Elkins
#90. I can see forms and shapes in my mind when I solo, just as a painter can see forms and shapes when he starts painting. And I can see different colors.
Elvin Jones
#91. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they may say something.
Georgia O'Keeffe
#92. A poem is a painting with imagery and words; a painting is a poem of color on a reflecting mirror.
Debasish Mridha
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Color is a language. It is the language of painting. How painting expresses itself is in large part with color.
Joseph Raffael
#97. 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
#98. Painting, like music, has nothing to do with the reproduction of nature, nor interpretation of intellectual meanings. Whoever is able to feel the beauty of colors and forms has understood nonobjective painting.
Hilla Von Rebay
#99. 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
#100. 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
