John French Sloan Quotes

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

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.

Drawing and color are by no means two different things. As you paint, you draw... When color is at its richest, form is at its fullest.

Many great works of art have only form, the sculpture of the thing. Color as used to signify realization by men like Titian and Rembrandt, gives greater life and tactile experience to the work.

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

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

Design and color are not distinct and separate. As one paints, one draws. The more the colors harmonize, the more the design takes form. When color is at it's richest, form is at its fullest.

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.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

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

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

Drawing and color are not separate at all; in so far as you paint, you draw. The more color harmonizes, the more exact the drawing becomes. When the color achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also

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

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.

By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.

People see so many things in the paintings. Although I never think of them, it charms me a little bit that people actually project actual scenarios on to the paintings. Hopefully that means that they have a little bit of life to them. Figuring out the rhythm, the structural element has been the key thing in this work, more than the color element. It really was the variety of different widths that lead to a certain movement, a rhythm. Otherwise I'd fall into anything that was too stripy or almost like bar codes, and it thwarted the natural flow of the painting.

I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I am forced to interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture. From the relationship I have found in all the tones there must result a living harmony of colors, a harmony analogous to that of a musical composition.

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.

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.

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

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.

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

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.

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