Paul Cezanne Quotes

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

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

The starting point of a picture for any painter is a matter of colors and form...I believe that the poetry of art - if that is what one may call it - is a matter of animating these forms and colors.

Drawing and color are by no means two different things. As you paint, you draw... When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.

Color and I are one. I am a painter.

Color, even more than drawing, is a means of liberation.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. Painting without drawing is just 'coloriness,' color excitement. To think of color for color's sake is like thinking of sound for sound's sake. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

The art of the colorist has in some ways elements of mathematics and music.

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.

Design and color are not distinct and separate. As one paints, one draws. The more the colors harmonize, the more the design takes form. When color is at it's richest, form is at its fullest.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality.

Color is a passion; painting is a passion.

I'm not interested in edges. I'm interested in the mass and color, the black and white. The edges happen because the forms get as quiet as they can be. I want the masses to perform. When I work with forms and colors, I get the edge.

There are colors which cause each other to shine brilliantly, which form a couple which complete each other like man and woman.

In some ways painters have been more important in my life than writers. Painters teach you how to see—a faculty that usually isn’t highly developed in poets. Whether you take a walk in the woods with a painter, or go to a museum with one, through them you notice shapes, colors, harmonies, relationships that enhance your own seeing.

Drawing is feeling. Color is an act of reason.

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.

It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colorist. Color becomes significant only when it becomes form.

I build a painting by putting little marks together-some look like hot dogs, some like doughnuts.

I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.

Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about.

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