Yves Klein Quotes

Drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses.

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.

Purer colors... have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them.

Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena.... But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.

We never really perceive what color is physically!

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

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

Color cannot stand alone.

There is no criterion by which to recognize what is a color, except that it is one of our colors.

How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

The 'pure' red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters' caps and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling toward red and its relations.

Art trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

Colors produce a spiritual vibration, the impression they create is important only as a step towards this vibration.

The light is there, and colors surround us. However, if there were no light nor colors in our own eye, we wouldn't perceive such things outside of us.

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color.

The locomotives are black. The coal is black. The tracks are black. The night is black. So what am I going to do with color?

An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Little as we know about the way in which we are affected by form, by color, and light, we do know this, that they have an actual physical effect.

If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other color?

Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.

It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.