Henri Matisse Quotes

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

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

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?

You reason color more than you reason drawing... Color has a logic as severe as form.

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.

Though colour may appear at first a part of painting merely mechanical, yet it still has its rules, and those grounded upon that presiding principle which regulates both the great and the little in the study of a painter.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you're trying to make.

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

The distinct blue, red, and yellow colors... though they have not the kind of harmony which is produced by a variety of broken and transparent colors, have the effect of grandeur.

All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of color as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

I am always in the hope to express the love of two lovers by a marriage of two complementary colors - colors which marry each other... complement each other as a man and a woman do.

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.

Not only can color, which is under fixed laws, be taught like music, but it is easier to learn than drawing, whose elaborate principles cannot be taught.

To express a marriage of two complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious vibrations of kindred tones.

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

Sunset is still my favorite color, and rainbow is second.

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

Some colors reconcile themselves to one another, others just clash.

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.

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