Robert Delaunay Quotes

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

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

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.

In nature, light creates the color. In the picture, color creates the light.

The plate at each point only sends back to the eye the simple colour imprinted. The other colours are destroyed by interference. The eye thus perceives at each point the constituent colour of the image.

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

I'd like to get all the colors in the world into one painting

Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight.

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

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

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

There is a logic of colors, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform.

The important thing is not the camera but the eye.

I've always been very interested in the visual aspect of what I do.

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

[My work] is using light as a material to influence or affect the medium of perception. I feel that I want to use light as this wonderful and magic elixir that we drink as Vitamin D through the skin - and I mean, we are literally light-eaters - to then affect the way that we see.

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

Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

Only the series of colors on the canvas with all their power and vibrancy could, in combination with each other, render the chromatic feeling of that landscape.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. Painting without drawing is just 'coloriness,' color excitement. To think of color for color's sake is like thinking of sound for sound's sake. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.

The act of making a photograph is less a question of what is being looked at than how.

Art, to me is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. The word 'Impressionism' as applied to art has been abused, and in the general acceptance of the term has become perverted. [...] The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe. They take the ready-made axioms laid down by others, and walk blindly in a rut without trying to see for themselves.

Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.

Perhaps blue, red, and yellow strike the mind more forcibly from there not being any great union between them, as martial music, which is intended to rouse the nobler passions.

What reinforces the content of a photograph is the sense of rhythm - the relationship between shapes and values.