Wassily Kandinsky Quotes

Color is a means to exert a direct influence on the soul.

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

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

I am a believer that color affects people's moods.

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract . . . a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.

Color is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that's the difference!

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

Generally speaking, color directly influences the soul.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways.

The aim of our studies is to prove that color is the most relative means of artistic expression, that we never really perceive what color is physically.

The dominant invades the entire picture, as it were. In this way I seek to individualize the color, because I have come to believe that there is a living world of each color and I express these worlds.

The whole body reacts to color. If you were to walk into an all-neon-pink room, it would be difficult not to react. I think it is a unified, human thing to feel color with everything. It is like standing next to a bass speaker plugged into your eyeballs.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.

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.

Color is a matter of taste and of sensitivity.

I'm in love with red. I think it's such a passionate color. Every flag of every country pretty much has red it it. It's power, there's no fence sitting with red. Either you love it or you don't. I think its blood and strength and life. I do love red. I love all colors. Great shades of blue, you find them in nature. They're all magic.

Color is an intense experience on its own.

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

'The Night Cafe' and 'The Starry Night' still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

In short, [Coltrane's] tone is beautiful because it is functional. In other words, it is always involved in saying something. You can't separate the means that a man uses to say something from what he ultimately says. Technique is not separated from its content in a great artist.