Pierre Bonnard Quotes

When I put a green, it is not grass. When I put a blue, it is not the sky.

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.

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.

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

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.

Color must be thought, imagined, dreamed.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

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

Color cannot stand alone.

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

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.

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

Color is everything. When color is right, form is right.

By using patches of color and tone it is possible to capture every natural impression in the simplest way, freshly and immediately.

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

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

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color.

Color, which is the poet's wealth, is so expensive that most take to mere outline sketches and become men of science.

Depth, in a pictorial, plastic sense, is not created by the arrangement of objects one after another toward a vanishing point, in the sense of the Renaissance perspective, but on the contrary (and in absolute denial of this doctrine) by the creation of forces in the sense of push and pull . Nor is depth created by tonal gradation (another doctrine of the academician which, at its culmination, degraded the use of color to a mere function of expressing dark and light).

You put a blob of yellow here, and another at the further edge of the canvas: straight away a rapport is established between them. Colour acts in the way that music does.

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

It is with color that you render light, though you must also feel this light, have it within yourself.

Cobalt is a divine color and there is nothing as fine for putting an atmosphere round things. Carmine is the red of wine and is warm and lively like wine. The same goes for emerald green too. It's false economy to dispense with them, with those colors. Cadmium as well.