Colour Theory Quotes

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!

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.

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another.

When I used to do abstract paintings at school, like everyone else, the tutor said these would make great curtains. I would always neglect the formal stuff that was going on by using colour, because colour kind of came naturally to me.

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.

I've never worked in advertising - my experience was as an editorial designer for magazines - but you could say, in the bigger picture, that magazines are vehicles for colour advertising.

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

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

While I was at college studying design I decided to paint. I was also greatly inspired by the colours that I had seen on my travels in the Brazilian Rain forest.

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 is wonderful how much depends upon the relations of black and white A black and white, if properly balanced, suggests colour.

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

I learned from Seurat this important thing about colour and light, that 'a light' can be built from colour. I learned a great deal about interaction, that 'a blue' in different parts will play all sorts of different roles.

I think it is very hard to design in colours you don't feel right about.

Shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones.

The fundamental grey which differentiates the masters, expresses them and is the soul of all colour.

I do like to play around with colour, although day-to-day, I probably wear a lot of black.

I have these large pieces of recycled brown paper stretched on my apartment wall and when I am not doing anything fashion-related, I'm drawing on it, playing with colour spectrums.

I use a wide selection of colours. It is impossible to produce work like mine using only the primary colours as they only mix a certain range of colour.

Every decided colour does a certain violence to the eye, and forces the organ to opposition.

The first colour charts were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples. They were still related to Pop Art. In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions.

A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth.

From what has been said it is also evident, that the Whiteness of the Sun's Light is compounded all the Colours wherewith the several sorts of Rays whereof that Light consists, when by their several Refrangibilities they are separated from one another, do tinge Paper or any other white Body whereon they fall. For those Colours ... are unchangeable, and whenever all those Rays with those their Colours are mix'd again, they reproduce the same white Light as before.

I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.