Fernand Leger Quotes

Color cannot stand alone.

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

The muted color scheme allows the occasional brighter yellow or red to pop out on the wall in a show, which I like.

I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.

I look at the textures, surfaces, colors, and the individual objects in the painting. And then I wonder: what are the relationships among them? Those relationships are everything.

Suffice it to say that black and white are also colors... for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance.

Color is enslaved by line, that becomes writing.

The secret of 'fusion' is the fact that the artist's eye sees in nature... an inexhaustible wealth of tension, rhythms, continuities, and contrasts which can be rendered in line and color.

My lines all curve. I tend to connect the wrong dots.

Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and color and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture.

Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn’t need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn’t need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.

Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point.

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design. The term 'life' as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it applies all of its existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again be great.

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.

The relation of color and the relation of proportion are both based on the relation of position.

The backgrounds by design are a very key part of the conversation, because I want a kind of fight or pressure to exist between the figure and the background.

White must be the lightest color in a picture.

The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination.

It is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

Our modern ideas of 'functioning' through things are really quite inhuman. We have this idea that no matter what is going on we still have to color between the lines, act normal.

To achieve vital harmony in a picture it must be constructed out of parts in themselves incomplete, brought into harmony only at the last stroke.

Tintoretto attempted to fill the line of Michelangelo with color, without tracing its principle.

In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line.

I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours.