Paul Cezanne Quotes

There is no greater mystery to me than that of light traveling through darkness.

You have to understand the nature of light.

Whenever you look at light, basically it's just air. It has no tactileness to it. It's totally without density.

OK, so what's the speed of dark?

Since light is best expressed through differences in color quality, color should not be handled as a tonal gradation, to produce the effect of light.

Light is therefore color.

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

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

Paint your picture by means of the lights. Lights define texture and color - shadows define form.

Art is not nature... There was a lot more to be got out of color.

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.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

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.

I like to write about painting because I think visually. I see my writing as blocks of color before it forms itself. I think I also care about painting because I'm not musical. Painting to me is not a metaphor for writing, but something people do that can never be reduced to words.

A person with normal eyesight would have nothing to know in the way of 'Impressionism' unless he were in a blinding light or in the dusk or dark.

In art, as in science, reductionism does not trivialize our perception - of color, light, and perspective - but allows us to see each of these components in a new way.

The hard part is how to plan a picture so as to give to others what has happened to you. To render in paint an experience, to suggest the sense of light and color, of air and space.

Black is not a color.

One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.

There's more to light than the opposite of dark.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

I am interested in the physicality of light itself.

Art history is littered with work that involves light.

Sketching is almost everything. It is the painter's identity, his style, his conviction, and then color is just a gift to the drawing.

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