Derek Jarman Quotes

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.

Shape and color are my two strong things. And by doing this, drawing plants has always led me into my paintings and my sculptures.

I used to paint a lot of oil and now I paint more mixed-media stuff.

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

Color is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed.

I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use color the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit.

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

Color cannot stand alone.

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

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

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.

I use colors to bring fine points of story and character.

I continue to get further away from the usual painter's tools such as easel, palette, brushes, etc.

Color has always been important to me, ever since my first deluxe box of Crayolas.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

And all of this, all these physical aspects of painting at that time excited me very much. You could do a picture in just black and white. I mean all the things, whether you're soliciting permission or not, do give you permission.

Color is for me the purest form of expression, the purest abstract reality.

Being creative is my idea of heaven. I'm just incredibly fortunate that I can do it in artwork. Watercolor is what I started out with. What I love about watercolor is that a lot of happy accidents occur.

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

My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition.

When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.

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.

The painter... does not fit the paints to the world. He most certainly does not fit the world to himself. He fits himself to the paint. The self is the servant who bears the paintbox and its inherited contents.

I still love a lot of the guys who just paint.

Photography led me to experiment in graphic work and, actually, painting.