Etel Adnan Quotes

I use about 20 different colours to retain the luminance in my work.

I'm not afraid of color. I like color.

Colour can raise the dead.

What counts is putting the intensity that you yourself have experienced into the picture. Otherwise it is just a document.

Color is so intuitive.

Red is a colour I've felt very strongly about. Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it's one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level.

I really love color.

To describe and explain my ideas is to lose them.

Music inflames temperament.

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.

Even colors were important to me. If it was a somber scene, the colors were muted and dark. If it was a happy or seductive scene, the colors were brighter.

I like light, color, luminosity. I like things full of color and vibrant.

In the studio, we adhere to a strict colour code. Developed over decades, the colour code consists of a finite and precise colour palate... The whole world as we experience it comes to us through the mystic realm of colour.

I like colours. I like to be bright and bold.

I don't deal in terminology, I deal with expressions: colors, shapes, tones, characteristics.

Art history is littered with work that involves light.

I love thinking of music of this way to access some kind of illogical realm filled with all kinds of aberrations and weird stuff. It's not implicit in music to have a story, so it creates this incredible potential for vague stories.

This may sound corny, but I've always liked to make things that were beautiful.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody.

When the woman is attractive, is it an interesting picture, or is it the woman? I had a lot of headaches with that, which was why it was interesting. I don't think I always got it straight.

Art is to be admired rather than explained. The jargon of these sculptors is beyond me. I do not precisely know why I admire a green granite, female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.

The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.

Black is not sad. Bright colours are what depress me. They're so... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not.

The artist must train not only his eye but also his soul, so that it can weigh colours in its own scale and thus become a determinant in artistic creation.

It has been said that beauty is a promise of happiness. Conversely, the possibility of pleasure can be a beginning of beauty.