Joshua Reynolds Quotes

Not only can color, which is under fixed laws, be taught like music, but it is easier to learn than drawing, whose elaborate principles cannot be taught.

For those colours which you wish to be beautiful, always first prepare a pure white ground.

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

You reason color more than you reason drawing... Color has a logic as severe as form.

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

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

Think colour! Know how to imagine it!

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.

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

All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of color as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective.

Color cannot stand alone.

Many photographers are apt to confuse color with noise, and to congratulate themselves when they have almost blown you down with screeching hues alone-a bebop of electric blues, furious reds, and poison greens.

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

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.

It's really easy to get colors right. It's really hard to get black - and neutrals - right. Black is certainly a color but it's also an illusion.

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.

Colour is always a consequence, never a cause.

Above all, keep your colors fresh!

The distinct blue, red, and yellow colors... though they have not the kind of harmony which is produced by a variety of broken and transparent colors, have the effect of grandeur.

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

Independent of harmony rules, any color 'goes' or 'works' with any other color, presupposing that their quantities are appropriate.

Beware of color theories. Theories in color photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point.

The art of the colorist has in some ways elements of mathematics and music.

In teaching color, you teach people how to look something and see the tone in it and break it down to be able to paint it and reproduce that color. But then, I'm psychedelic, so I look at color differently. I like colors that are in contrast with one another, so that they flicker back and forth.

In most scripts, one or two characters have a lot of colors.