Robert Irwin Quotes

Don't put needless expense into painting a head! Don't try to match tints! Rose and pearly colours blend into each other so that no one can unite them if painted separately. Keep the impression of your subject as one thing!

But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.

In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.

There are people who don't respond to color. That's what painting is. It's color.

It's really easy to get colors right. It's really hard to get black - and neutrals - right. Black is certainly a color but it's also an illusion.

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

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.

Color cannot stand alone.

Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.

In teaching color, you teach people how to look something and see the tone in it and break it down to be able to paint it and reproduce that color. But then, I'm psychedelic, so I look at color differently. I like colors that are in contrast with one another, so that they flicker back and forth.

You buy any book on color theory today, and it's just complete poppycock. Everybody comes out of school painting pink, purple and green. The whole damn cartoon industry has pink purple and green on their mind.

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.

The little may contrast with the great, in painting, but cannot be said to be contrary to it. Oppositions of colors contrast; but there are also colors contrary to each other, that is, which produce an ill effect because they shock the eye when brought very near it.

Color is a big part of what I do. It's like music. There are only so many notes in the scale, but there are endless permutations; there's no limit to the number. Color on the walls or furniture can reflect back and distort the reality of the true colors of lipsticks and eye shadow.

Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.

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.

Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon - it is the very heart of painting.

You must try to match your colors as nearly as you can to those you see before you, and you must study the effects of light and shade on nature's own hues and tints.

Stick to primary colors.

I use dull colors in my drawings because I started out using a root beer base, because it seemed like an interesting idea, and when it turned out that it worked quite well as an ink, I started using other colors that would complement it, like grays from Higgins black writing ink and, more recently, Dr. P.H. Martin's olive green and vermilion.

I've never been one for color theory or color wheels or undertone rules or anything like that. I don't know if my red lipstick 'should' be more blue or more orange.

For those colours which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.

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

Think colour! Know how to imagine it!