Henri Matisse Quotes

Color is a big part of what I do. It's like music. There are only so many notes in the scale, but there are endless permutations; there's no limit to the number. Color on the walls or furniture can reflect back and distort the reality of the true colors of lipsticks and eye shadow.

Colour, as the strange and magnificent expression of the inscrutable spectrum of Eternity, is beautiful and important to me as a painter; I use it to enrich the canvas and to probe more deeply into the object. Colour also decided, to a certain extent, my spiritual outlook, but it is subordinated to life, and above all, to the treatment of form. Too much emphasis on colour at the expense of form and space would make a double manifestation of itself on the canvas, and this would verge on craft work.

The rhythm of relations of color and size makes the absolute appear in the relativity of time and space.

I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.

I learned my color in Europe. I've always been a colorist, I think. I started when I was very young, being a bird-watcher, fascinated by the bird colors.

Color is so intuitive.

But what is of great importance to me is observation of the movement of colors.

Black is not a color.

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

Think colour! Know how to imagine it!

Colour could give rise to sensations which would interfere with our conception of space.

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

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

Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch you add in other places.

Color cannot stand alone.

Raphael and Titian seem to have looked at Nature for different purposes; they both had the power of extending their view to the whole; but one looked only for the general effect as produced by form, the other as produced by colour.

Colour acts simultaneously with form, but has nothing to do with form.

Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing?

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

Color, to continue had to occur in space.

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

I have worked to free shape from its ground, and then to work the shape so that it has a definite relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself of its parts (angles, curves, edges and mass); and so that, with color and tonality, the shape finds its own space and always demands its freedom and separateness.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.

Photography, if there is photography, is already snapped, already shot, in the very interior of things and for all points of space.