Georges Braque Quotes

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

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.

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

The colored planes, as much by position and dimension as by the greater value given to color, plastically express only relationships and not forms.

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.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

How do you show what's not there? How do you show energy?

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

Think colour! Know how to imagine it!

Color is everything. When color is right, form is right.

The actual basis of colour is instability. Once you accept that in lieu of something which is stable, which is form, you are dealing with something which is unstable in its basic character, you begin to get a way of dealing with it.

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

Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

Ah, Manet has come very, very close to it and Courbet - the marrying of form and colour.

People see so many things in the paintings. Although I never think of them, it charms me a little bit that people actually project actual scenarios on to the paintings. Hopefully that means that they have a little bit of life to them. Figuring out the rhythm, the structural element has been the key thing in this work, more than the color element. It really was the variety of different widths that lead to a certain movement, a rhythm. Otherwise I'd fall into anything that was too stripy or almost like bar codes, and it thwarted the natural flow of the painting.

The form of my painting is the content. My work is made of single or multiple panels: rectangle, curved, or square. I am less interested in marks on the panels than the 'presence' of the panels themselves. In Red Yellow Blue III the square panels present color. It was made to exist forever in the present; it is an idea and can be repeated anytime in the future.

I'm not an abstractionist... I'm not interested in relationships of colour or form or anything else.

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

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

Colored planes, by their position and size as well as by their value, express only relationships, not forms.

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

Color cannot stand alone.