Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

Color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.

Colour as perceived by us is a function of three independent variables at least three are I think sufficient, but time will show if I thrive.

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

Color exists in itself, possessing its own beauty.

Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form.

It is necessary to introduce light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, and a sufficient amount of blues, to obtain an airy feeling.

Colouring does not depend on where the colours are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on form and outline, on where that is put.

We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.

Black is real sensation, even if it is produced by entire absence of light. The sensation of black is distinctly different from the lack of all sensations.

I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.

Think colour! Know how to imagine it!

Color has got me. I no longer need to chase after it. It has got me for ever. I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour.

Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter.

Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our conception of space.

There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.

Remember the enemy of all painting is gray: a painting will almost always appear grayer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light.

Color must be thought, imagined, dreamed.

Turning to the colour-classification methodology: The starting point are the four pure colours red, yellow, green and blue; their in-between shades and scales of brightness result in colour schemes containing 16, 64, 256 and 1,024 shades. More colours would be pointless because it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between them clearly.

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. To such an extent indeed that one day, finding myself at the deathbed of a woman who had been and still was very dear to me, I caught myself in the act of focusing on her temples and automatically analyzing the succession of appropriately graded colors which death was imposing on her motionless face.

We never really perceive what color is physically!

In the end, color combinations come down to our personal preferences, which we must discover through observation and experiment.

Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.

The spectator, as he walks the gallery, will stop, or pass along. To give a general air of grandeur at first view, all trifling, or artful play of little lights, or an attention to a variety of tints is to be avoided; a quietness and simplicity must reign over the whole work, to which a breadth of uniform and simple color will very much contribute.