James C. Maxwell Quotes

We never really perceive what color is physically!

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

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.

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

Think colour! Know how to imagine it!

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

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

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

And I don't care what else anyone has ever told you, the Sun is white, not yellow. Human color perception is a complicated business, but if the Sun were yellow, like a yellow lightbulb, then white stuff such as snow would reflect this light and appear yellow-a snow condition confirmed to happen only near fire hydrants.

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

They say no one knows if we all see red the same way. Except traffic cops.

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

White does not exist in nature.

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.

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.

For the Rays, to speak properly, have no Colour. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this Colour or that.

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.

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

Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.

Should I not be proud, when for twenty years I have had to admit to myself that the great Newton and all the mathematicians and noble calculators along with him were involved in a decisive error with respect to the doctrine of color, and that I among millions was the only one who knew what was right in this great subject of nature?

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?

Color cannot stand alone.

Light is therefore color.

I don't want any colour to be noticeable... I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent... Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid.