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Colour is a sensation on the human eye caused by reflected light

• Colour: The property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way it reflects or emits light.  Oxford Dictionary
• Colour: Aspect of any object that may be described in terms of hue, lightness, and saturation. It is associated with the visible wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, which stimulate the sensor cells of the eye. Merriam Webster
• I want to know one thing. What is colour? Pablo Picasso
• Art,  Beauty

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Colour is the fruit of life …

• Colour is the fruit of life. Guillaume Apollinaire
• Colour is life, for a world without colour seems dead. As a flame produces light, light produces colour. As intonation lends colour to the spoken word, colour lends spiritually realized sound to a form. Johannes Itten

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… the daily bread of the eye

• Colour is something we see with our eyes, but love is something we see with our heart. Joan Walsh Anglund
• Colour is the daily bread of the eyes. It is not only seen but also must be felt. Frank Webb
• Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours. John Ruskin
• The learned compute that seven hundred and seven millions of millions of vibrations have to penetrate the eye before the eye can distinguish the tints of a violet. Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

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We need colour to live

• Man needs colour to live; it’s just as necessary an element as fire and water. Fernand Leger
• Human needs

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Colour is the surface skin that fits over form

• The great black and white draftsman, the sculptor, and the blind man know that form and colour are separate. The form itself is what the blind man knows… Colour is surface skin that fits over the form. John Sloan
• The actual basis of colour is instability. Once you accept that in lieu of something which is stable, which is form, you are dealing with something which is unstable in its basic character, you begin to get a way of dealing with it. Bridget Riley
• Colouring does not depend on where the colours are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on form and outline, on where that is put. William Blake
• When the colour achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also. Paul Cezanne
• Colour is all. When colour is right, form is right. Colour is everything, colour is vibration like music; everything is vibration. Marc Chagall
• You reason colour more than you reason drawing… Colour has a logic as severe as form. Pierre Bonnard
• It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colours, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colourist. Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form. Clive Bell

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Colour is a wonderful thing

• Such lovely warmth of thought and delicacy of colour are beyond all praise, and equally beyond all thanks! Marie Corelli
• Truly colour is vice! Of course, it can be, and has the right to be one of the finest virtues. Controlled by the strong hand and careful guidance of her Master drawing, colour is a splendid Mistress, with a mate worthy of herself, her lover, but her Master likewise, the most magnificent Mistress possible, and the result is evident in all the glorious things that spring from their union. James Abbott McNeill Whistler

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The world is a sumptuous feast of colour …

• After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Richard Dawkins
• Each day has a colour, a smell. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
• Each day has its own individuality of colour. Charles Hawthorne
• Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colours. John Ruskin
• I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day. Vincent van Gogh
• The world is your kaleidoscope, and the varying combinations of colours which at every succeeding moment it presents to you are the exquisitely adjusted pictures of your ever-moving thoughts. James Allen

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… and nothing is more splendid in its colour than nature

• As artist Nature splashes colour across the vast canvas of the sky with the radiance and splendour of sunrise and sunset. She arches rainbows against the passing storm, creates flowers and foliage, sets autumn woods on fire with the beauty of turning leaves and touches mountaintops with snow crystals. Wilferd A. Peterson
• Colour which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power… Paul Gauguin
• Colours are the smiles of nature. Leigh Hunt
• Colour is as variable and evanescent in the form of pigment as in visible nature. Walter J. Phillips
• Colour is the soul of Nature and of the entire cosmos… Rudolf Steiner
• Heavens, how charming it is! There is now in the sky only the soft vaporous colour of pale citron – the last reflection of the sun which plunges into the dark blue of the night, going from green tones to a pale turquoise of an unheard-of fineness and a fluid delicacy quite indescribable… Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
• Then the sea and heaven rolled as one and from the two came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue. Wallace Stevens
• Those who are responsive to Nature, and more especially to the beautiful colours released at the sun’s rise and fall, to the silences of woods and forests, or to the ocean’s vast spaciousness, may use such contacts for attempts to get spiritual glimpses. Paul Brunton
• The sky is the soul of all scenery. It makes the earth lovely at sunrise and splendid at sunset. In the one it breathes over the earth a crystal-like ether, in the other a liquid gold. Thomas Cole
• Sit in reverie, and watch the changing colour of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Nowhere in nature can you find purer colour than sunlight passing through the petal of a flower. Larry K. Stephenson
• It is the sense of unfamiliar envelopment that is impressive, whether in the living grays of hoarfrost, the crimson of the heavens at sunset, or the golden suffusions of autumn. Walter J. Phillips
• Nature

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Colour is often at the very heart of beauty

• Beauty without colour seems somehow to belong to another world. Murasaki Shikibu
• Colour is only beautiful when it means something. Robert Henri
• Only those who love colour are admitted to its beauty and immanent presence. It affords utility to all, but unveils its deeper mysteries only to its devotees. Johannes Itten
• We are all flowers in the Great Spirit’s garden. We share a common root, and the root is Mother Earth.  The garden is beautiful because it has different colours in it, and those colours represent different traditions and cultural backgrounds. David Monongye
• Beauty

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Those who love colour the most are admitted most to its beauty

• The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most. John Ruskin
• Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Colour and I are one. I am a painter. Paul Klee
• Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them—in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures. John Ruskin
• We were always intoxicated with colour, with words that speak of colour, and with the sun that makes colours live. Andre Derain
• I love colour. A visit to the grocery store is a treat –all those beautiful fruits and vegetables! Joyce Ward
• I love colour. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz. Damien Hirst
• I never met a colour I didn’t like. Dale Chihuly
• Only those who love colour are admitted to its beauty and immanent presence. It affords utility to all, but unveils its deeper mysteries only to its devotees. Johannes Itten

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Colour is a powerful force …

• Colour which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power… Paul Gauguin
• Colour provokes a psychic vibration. Colour hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body. Wassily Kandinsky
• A dominant colour possesses tremendous power in making a painting unique. Mary Bassi
• Colour is a powerful physical, biological, and psychological force. When less colour and less intense colour is present, trace amounts and subtle differences become highly significant and are strongly felt. John Paul Caponigro
• Good colour really means good taste; and ‘powerful’ colour means a reserve, to give a climax its full force, and not ‘red, white, and blue all over. John F. Carlson

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… that can have a profound effect on us

• A certain blue enters your soul. A certain red has an effect on your blood-pressure. Henri Matisse
• Colour affects our life. Colour is physical… we see it. Colour communicates… we receive information from the language of colour. Colour is emotional… it evokes our feelings. Bride M. Whelan
• Colour affects the atmosphere of a classroom and its students… nurturing neutrals to decorate the classroom, with just enough cool colours to create a calm… However, the work they create is always vibrant, full of warm, brilliant splashes of colour – the most colourful thing in the room! Dorenda Crager Watson
• Colour provokes a psychic vibration. Colour hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body. Wassily Kandinsky
• Colour, rather than shape, is more closely related to emotion. David Katz
• Colour stops me in the street, invites me to breathe it in and take it with me. Suzanne Partridge
• Purer colours… have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them. Henri Matisse
• Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. Oscar Wilde

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Colour can be an intense experience

• I’m trying to get to the core of what I’m about, in colour. I’m mining the colour to get to the core of a personal colour experience. Jonathan Forrest
• Colour is an intense experience on its own. Jim Hodges
• The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of colour. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of colour should likewise find expression in a work of art. Hans Hofmann
• He who wishes to become a master of colour must see, feel, and experience each individual colour in its endless combinations with all other colours. Johannes Itten
• Whether the flower or the colour is the focus I do not know. I do know the flower is painted large to convey my experience with the flower – and what is my experience if it is not the colour? Georgia O’Keeffe
• I know I cannot paint a flower. I cannot paint the sun on the desert on a bright summer morning, but maybe in terms of paint colour I can convey to you my experience of the flower or the experience that makes the flower of significance to me at that particular time. Georgia O’Keeffe
• Full colour experience is peculiarly satisfying even though it is exhausting and leaves you feeling two-thirds colour blind when you’re not making the effort. William Tapley

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Colour is a kind of language …

• Colour! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams. Paul Gauguin
• Colour is the language of the poets. It is astonishingly lovely. To speak it is a privilege. Keith Crown
• Colours speak all languages. Joseph Addison
• Colour affects our life. Colour is physical… we see it. Colour communicates… we receive information from the language of colour. Colour is emotional… it evokes our feelings. Bride M. Whelan
• Colour is uncontainable. It effortlessly reveals the limits of language and evades our best attempts to impose a rational order on it… To work with colour is to become acutely aware of the insufficiency of language and theory – which is both disturbing and pleasurable. David Batchelor
• I think the names of colours are at the edge, between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful. A.S. Byatt
• I try to apply colours like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music. Joan Miro
• Language

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… a language that words are often too limited to express

• Our ordinary language has no means for describing a particular shade of colour. Thus it is incapable of producing a picture of this colour. Ludwig Wittgenstein
• I think the names of colours are at the edge, between where language fails and where it’s at its most powerful. A.S. Byatt
• Language

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Colour is one of the purest forms of expression …

• I found I could say things with colours that I couldn’t say in any other way – things that I had no words for. Georgia O’Keeffe
• I have always wanted my colours to sing. Paul Delvaux
• The chief function of colour should be to serve expression. Henri Matisse
• Expression: The action of making known one’s thoughts or feelings. Oxford Dictionary
• The use of expressive colours is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice. Henri Matisse
• The chief function of colour should be to serve expression. Henri Matisse
• Purer colours… have in themselves, independently of the objects they serve to express, a significant action on the feelings of those who look at them. Henri Matisse
• Colour and light must be entirely melted into one and felt as such – and light must be expressed as it is felt as colour. Morgan Russell
• Colours express the main psychic functions of man. Carl Jung
• Colour, like everything else concerning visual expression, usually boils down to a gift, an innate sensibility and sensitivity. Ultimately, artists develop their own palette and colour sense. Scott Kahn
• The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of colour. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of colour should likewise find expression in a work of art. Hans Hofmann

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… and can be pregnant with meaning

• Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Colour and I are one. I am a painter. Paul Klee
• Mere colour, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. Oscar Wilde
• Colour can be the true main thing in art that is widely valued – even valued by the maker of the art – for other meanings. Matthew Collings
• In our life, there is a single colour, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the colour of love. Marc Chagall
• Meaning

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Colour can convey mood

• The image begins to tell me what mood it’s in – happy, sad – which tells me what colours to use and how to continue. Ruth B. Rieber
• Allow one colour, or just a couple of analogous colours, to dominate the mood of the painting; and let the others fulfil a supporting role. Zoltan Szabo
• Colour creates, enhances, changes, reveals and establishes the mood of the painting. Kiff Holland
• Used throughout a room, orange can become surprisingly neutral, and yet it can be bright and mood-enhancing. Jonathan Adler
• Mood

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Colour is a central element of art

• All painting worth its name, unless one is talking about black and white, must include the idea of colour as one of its necessary supports, in the same way that it includes chiaroscuro, proportion, and perspective. Eugene Delacroix
• Colour is the essence of painting, which the subject always killed. Kasimir Malevich
• Colour is the pulse of the painting. Michele Cooper
• Colours in painting are as allurements for persuading the eyes, as the sweetness of meter is in poetry. Nicolas Poussin
• Colour creates, enhances, changes, reveals and establishes the mood of the painting. Kiff Holland
• Economy should be studiously avoided in the setting of the palette; there is nothing more likely to give a bad style in oil painting than insufficiency of colours. John Collier
• Colour is not about things, it is the means to show their presence in the painting. Bill White
• If light is the spiritual quality of painting, colour is surely its heart and passion. Robert Reynolds
• Painting is a mosaic of colours weaved into a seamless whole. Igor Babailov
• The older I get, the more I feel that colour is what painting is. Painting is primarily colour. Joseph Raffael
• A variation of edges, along with the proper value, allows the artist to draw attention to or away from different areas of the painting… Likewise, use of colour draws attention to an area… Kenn Backhaus
• When the colour achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also. Paul Cezanne
• Ah, Chardin, what you grind on your palette is not this colour or that… but the very substance of things. You dip your brush in air and light and spread them on your canvas. Denis Diderot
• Colour in a picture is like enthusiasm in Life. Vincent van Gogh
• Art is your personal diary where you may colour your thoughts and emotions on a page. Sara
• Art without colour would lose much of its purpose. Andrew Loomis
• The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of colour. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of colour should likewise find expression in a work of art. Hans Hofmann
• Art

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Open your senses and mind fully to the colours around you

• Use your senses fully. Be where you are. Look around. Just look, don’t interpret. See the light, shapes, colours, textures. Be aware of the silent presence of each thing. Be aware of the space that allows everything to be. Listen to the sounds; don’t judge them. Listen to the silence underneath the sounds. Touch something – anything – and feel and acknowledge its Being. Observe the rhythm of your breathing; feel the air flowing in and out, feel the life energy inside your body. Allow everything to be, within and without. Allow the “isness” of all things. Move deeply into the Now. Eckhart Tolle
• Those who are responsive to Nature, and more especially to the beautiful colours released at the sun’s rise and fall, to the silences of woods and forests, or to the ocean’s vast spaciousness, may use such contacts for attempts to get spiritual glimpses. Paul Brunton
• The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colours, details and irony. Orhan Pamuk
• Colours are brighter when the mind is open. Adriana Alarcon
• I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. Alice Walker, The Colour Purple
• I find great pleasure in using colour out of context to express emotion and to entertain the viewer. Carlton Plummer
• The senses,  Awareness,  Observation

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Learn to really see colour

• The man who can see all grey, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and greys, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over colour is always a sign of large general art-intellect. John Ruskin
• The painter has to unlearn the habit of thinking that things seem to have the colour which common sense says they ‘really’ have, and to learn the habit of seeing things as they appear. Bertrand Russell
• A red apple isn’t red, nor the lemon yellow. The sky is seldom blue, only when it isn’t… Keith Crown
• You must try to match your colours as nearly as you can to those you see before you, and you must study the effects of light and shade on nature’s own hues and tints. William Merritt Chase
• If you see a tree as blue, then make it blue. Paul Gauguin
• Perception

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Surround yourself with colours that nourish you

• Invent your world. Surround yourself with people, colour, sounds, and work that nourish you. SARK

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Surround yourself with cheerful colours

• Today we need colour more than at any time in history. Blacks and grays, both depressing, should be replaced in clothes, offices and homes with new colours that give inspiration, tranquillity and happiness. Linda Clark
• Cheerfulness

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Colours interact with each other and to effect and influence each other

• He who knows how to appreciate colour relationships, the influence of one colour on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery. Sonia Delaunay
• He who wishes to become a master of colour must see, feel, and experience each individual colour in its endless combinations with all other colours. Johannes Itten
• Missing in a painting of compatible colour are exciting interactions. Jeanne Dobie
• Each colour is applied to the canvas in relation to the colours next to it. The painting becomes a living thing and calls out for the colour it wants. Neil Patterson
• Any ground subtracts its own hue from the colours which it carries and therefore influences. Josef Albers
• Colours must fit together as pieces in a puzzle or cogs in a wheel. Hans Hofmann
• Colours are promiscuous. They get infected by their neighbours. Paul Richard
• Anything can be any colour at any time depending on what colour everything else is at the time. Keith Crown

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Making colours interact is what artists do

• I take a break and do some close-up figurative pieces, just taking enjoyment in the way the colours butt up against each other in a pleasurable way… happily exploring. Liz Reday
• Why do two colours, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? No. Just as one can never learn how to paint. Pablo Picasso
• You can spend a lifetime studying the interaction of colours, and painting how red can dance, so when the viewer ‘gets it’ and says ‘Aha!’ their way of seeing is transformed. Gayle Konantz
• In painting, whether colour reflection is apparent or not, every hue must echo neighbouring hues, so that homogeneity may be attained. Walter J. Phillips
• The mind is excited by what painters refer to as ‘broken colour’, the juxtaposition of two or more colours in a single passage. Eric Wiegardt
• If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it’s wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing. Bridget Riley
• Fine colour implies a unified relationship, in which each part is subordinate to the whole, and the transitions between them are felt to be as precious and beautiful as the colours themselves. In fact, the colours themselves must be continuously modified and broken as part of the transition. Sir Kenneth Clark
• The picture will have charm when each colour is very unlike the one next to it. Leon Battista Alberti

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Colours can be used together to create beautiful harmony …

• A colour strategy is like a recipe for harmony – a set of colour relationships that are proven to work well and can be used as a formula for building our colour composition. Mitchell Albala
• Art is harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and of similar elements of tone, of colour and of line, conditioned by the dominate key, and under the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations. Georges Seurat
• Colour is a plastic means of creating intervals… colour harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and colour tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony. Hans Hofmann
• I will use contrasting colours to disrupt an area of colour that I find too harmonious, until a new harmony or an interesting clash occurs. Jean-Claude Langer
• Independent of harmony rules, any colour ‘goes’ or ‘works’ with any other colour, presupposing that their quantities are appropriate. Josef Albers
• I’ve come to realize that where harmony is concerned, more can be achieved with less colour. Scott L. Christensen
• The distinct blue, red, and yellow colours… though they have not the kind of harmony which is produced by a variety of broken and transparent colours, have the effect of grandeur. Sir Joshua Reynolds
• Women think of all colours except the absence of colour. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony. Coco Chanel
• Harmony

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… like musical notes working together to create beautiful music

• You put down one colour and it calls for an answer. You have to look at it like a melody. Romare Bearden
• 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… Georges Braque
• Colour is a plastic means of creating intervals… colour harmonics produced by special relationships, or tensions. We differentiate now between formal tensions and colour tensions, just as we differentiate in music between counterpoint and harmony. Hans Hofmann
• Music gives colour to the air of the moment. Karl Lagerfeld
• Colour is all. When colour is right, form is right. Colour is everything, colour is vibration like music; everything is vibration. Marc Chagall
• The key of D is daffodil yellow, B major is maroon, and B flat is blue. Marian McPartland
• Music

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The artist’s palette can be thought of as an instrument that creates musical notes

• Who ever heard of a musician who was passionately fond of B flat? Colour is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form. John Sloan
• At a certain point the well-versed musician does not need to think of the keys, where they are located, or which scale or sequence of notes will recall a certain mood… The artisan can think of the palette as an instrument with each of the colours representing a different note on the keyboard. Stephen Quiller
• Painting is drawing, with the additional means of colour. Painting without drawing is just ‘colouriness,’ colour excitement. To think of colour for colour’s sake is like thinking of sound for sound’s sake. Colour is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form. John Sloan
• A parallel between colour and music can only be relative –just as a violin can give warm shades of tone, so yellow has shades, which can be expressed by various instruments. Wassily Kandinsky
• There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen. There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.  Sun Tzu
• The sound of colours is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble… Wassily Kandinsky

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Colour is the brain’s interpretation and not a physical thing

• Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet. Paul Klee
• Colour is but a sensation and has no existence outside the nervous system of living beings. Nicholas Ogden Rood
• For the Rays, to speak properly, have no Colour. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this Colour or that. Isaac Newton

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Colour exists greatly in the imagination

• With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour. Theodore Gericault
• Think colour! Know how to imagine it! Gustave Moreau
• In Autumn, you can take one maple leaf and see almost all the colours of the rainbow in it – although you would need your imagination to see blue. Dorthe Eisenhardt
• Imagination

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Colour is inseparable from light

• Colour and Light are inseparable. Thomas Jefferson Kitts
• Colour and light must be entirely melted into one and felt as such – and light must be expressed as it is felt as colour. Morgan Russell
• Colours are light’s suffering and joy. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Colours are the deeds of light, its deeds and sufferings. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• I learned from Seurat this important thing about colour and light, that ‘a light’ can be built from colour. I learned a great deal about interaction, that ‘a blue’ in different parts the same blue will play all sorts of different roles. Bridget Riley
• Light is therefore colour. J. M. W. Turner
• It is still colour; it is not yet light. Pierre Bonnard
• All colours will agree in the dark. Francis Bacon
• As a flame produces light, light produces colour. Johannes Itten
• Light

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Colour is an interpretation of light and dark

• Colour is born of the interpenetration of light and dark. Sam Francis
• Colouring does not depend on where the colours are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on form and outline, on where that is put. William Blake
• Light,  Darkness

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Colour is a reflection

• Colour: The property possessed by an object of producing different sensations on the eye as a result of the way it reflects or emits light. Oxford Dictionary
• The more an object is polished or brilliant, the less you see its own colour and the more it becomes a mirror reflecting the colour of its surroundings. Eugene Delacroix
• As artists, we are most concerned with the behaviour of reflected light. When the reflected colours of the spectrum are curved around to form the familiar colour wheel, exciting relationships are revealed. Zoltan Szabo
• We don’t paint the colour of the subject; in reality, we paint the colours that reflect onto the subject. Andries Veerman

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Colour is a vibration

• Black and white are absolute… expressing the most delicate vibration, the most profound tranquillity, and unlimited profundity. Shiko Munakata
• Colour is all. When colour is right, form is right. Colour is everything, colour is vibration like music; everything is vibration. Marc Chagall
• Colour provokes a psychic vibration. Colour hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body. Wassily Kandinsky
• Colour which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power… Paul Gauguin
• Colours produce a corresponding spiritual vibration, and it is only as a step towards this spiritual vibration that the elementary physical impression is of importance. Wassily Kandinsky
• Colours in vibration, peeling like silver bells and clanging like bronze bells, proclaiming happiness, passion and love, soul, blood and death. Emil Nolde
• The learned compute that seven hundred and seven millions of millions of vibrations have to penetrate the eye before the eye can distinguish the tints of a violet. Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

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Colour has a temperature, and can be warm or cool

• I don’t think of myself as a ‘colourist’; I look at myself as a value painter. While I paint I do not think directly of what colours I wish to use… rather I think of temperature. Don O’Neill
• As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring. Wassily Kandinsky
• White is going to lighten things as well as cool them down, in general. Be aware of this.  Colin Poole
• Consider your warm/cool colours. Every cool note presents an opportunity to put a warm note right next to it. Richard Robinson
• I don’t know the difference between a warm colour and a cool one. Charles M. Russell
• If you… are moved only by the colour relationships, then you miss the point. Mark Rothko
• One has to arrive at a specific temperature, at which the objects become malleable. Georges Braque

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Colour has a hue

• Hue: The attribute of colours that permits them to be classed as red, yellow, green, blue, or an intermediate between any contiguous pair of these colours. Merriam Webster
• Hue does not refer to how light, dark, or intense, but only what kind of colour: what hue. It takes all three aspects to make a colour, therefore ‘red’ is not a colour, but only one aspect, the hue, of some partially defined colour. William Tapley
• Colour: Aspect of any object that may be described in terms of hue, lightness, and saturation. It is associated with the visible wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, which stimulate the sensor cells of the eye.  Merriam Webster

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Colour has a brightness to it

• Colours are brighter when the mind is open. Adriana Alarcon
• It seems obvious that colours vary according to lights, because when any colour is placed in the shade, it appears to be different from the same colour which is located in light. Shade makes colour dark, whereas light makes colour bright where it strikes. Leon Battista Alberti
• Trying to brighten a dull colour is nearly impossible… I start with a colour that is too intense so I can calm it as needed. Jane Jones

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Colour has a saturation

• Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid. Lucian Freud

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Each colour has a value

• After learning to see colour as value, the next step is to see colour as colour. Don Dame
• All colour depends on good value relationships. If it’s dark and light values are wrong, a colour will never look right. Ted Smuskiewicz
• An artist is either good at colour or good at value but rarely good at both. I focus on the tonal range, the dark-light effects, rather than the full colour range of bright colours. I just don’t know what to do with all those cadmiums. Thomas S. Buechner
• A variation of edges, along with the proper value, allows the artist to draw attention to or away from different areas of the painting… Likewise, use of colour draws attention to an area… Kenn Backhaus
• Give up the idea of ‘colour’ for a while! Consider masses – values, only… One dark and one light place in every picture. William Morris Hunt

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Shade has an effect on colour

• It seems obvious that colours vary according to lights, because when any colour is placed in the shade, it appears to be different from the same colour which is located in light. Shade makes colour dark, whereas light makes colour bright where it strikes. Leon Battista Alberti
• You must try to match your colours as nearly as you can to those you see before you, and you must study the effects of light and shade on nature’s own hues and tints. William Merritt Chase
• Colour provides an abundant number of metaphors

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A life can be said to contain colour, and the more colourful and vibrant it is, the better

• The kaleidoscope of colour which is my life, shows the interesting choices I’ve made along the way. Antie Koekie
• Every brush stroke on the canvas, every dab of colour introduced, the fine textures impressed in the paint – this accumulation of many small acts combines to shape a final work of art. And so it is with life.  Each step, each deed, each brief choice builds gradually, day by day, to shape both character and destiny.  Richelle E. Goodrich
• Every day is an opportunity to be creative – the canvas is your mind, the brushes and colours are your thoughts and feelings, the panorama is your story, the complete picture is a work of art called, ‘my life’. Be careful what you put on the canvas of your mind today – it matters. Innerspace
• You have your colours, you have your brushes, paint paradise and walk right in. Nikos Kazantzakis
• Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky. Rabindranath Tagore
• Colour in a picture is like enthusiasm in Life. Vincent van Gogh

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People have colours inside and their true colours often shine out

• A man is like a bit of labrador spar, which has no lustre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle, then it shows deep and beautiful colours. Emerson
• You can’t hide your true colours as you approach the autumn of your life.
• With any trial and circumstance, a person’s true colour either shines or darkens. Shannon Walker
• And all the colours I am inside have not been invented yet. Shel Silverstein
• My skin is kind of sort of brownish pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are greyish blueish green, but I’m told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, but its silver when its wet, and all the colours I am inside have not been invented yet. Shel Silverstein
• I am Charles Mingus. Half-black man. Yellow man. Half-yellow. Not even yellow, nor white enough to pass for nothing but black and not too light enough to be called white. Charles Mingus
• It’s wonderful when you can bring sparkle into people’s lives without fading away from your own true colour. Keep the hue in you. Dodinsky

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Words are chameleons that can change colour

• Words are chameleons, which reflect the colour of their environment. Learned Hand
• Words and thoughts concerning compassionate action that are not put into practice are like beautiful flowers that are colourful but have no fragrance. Thich Nhat Hanh
• Words are but the bannerets of a great army, a few bits of waving colour here and there; thoughts are the main body of the footman that march unseen below. Henry Ward Beecher
• Almost all words do have colour and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too. Gladys Taber
• Colour is the language of the poets. It is astonishingly lovely. To speak it is a privilege. Keith Crown
• Words

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Attitude is the paintbrush of the mind that colours all situations

• Attitude is the mind’s paint brush. It can colour a situation gloomy or gray, or cheerful and gay. Mary C. Crowley
• Your attitude is like a box of crayons that colour your world. Constantly colour your picture grey, and your picture will always be bleak. Try adding some bright colours to the picture by including humour, and your picture begins to lighten up. Allen Klein
• An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight. The truly wise person is colour-blind. Albert Schweitzer
• Attitude

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Perception and desire are lenses that moulds the colour of what we see

• We colour and mould according to the wants within us whatever our eyes bring in. Thomas Hardy
• Human psychology has a near universal tendency to let belief be coloured by desire. Richard Dawkins
• Too often we colour our perception with other peoples pencils. Tim Winter

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Colours can be used to describe moods and internal states

• Besides, I’ve been feeling a little blue – just a pale, elusive azure. It isn’t serious enough for anything darker. Lucy Maud Montgomery
• The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.  Claude Debussy
• We are like chameleons, we take our hue and the colour of our moral character, from those who are around us. John Locke
• Mood

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Colour can be used to describe human virtues

• Just as white light consists of coloured rays, so reverence for life contains all the components of ethics: love, kindliness, sympathy, empathy, peacefulness and power to forgive. Albert Schweitzer
• Modesty is the colour of virtue. Diogenes of Sinope
• In our life, there is a single colour, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the colour of love. Marc Chagall
• Virtue

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Some things can be said to add colour to life

• Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky. Rabindranath Tagore
• As the sun colours flowers, so does art colour life. John Lubbock

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More colour metaphors

• Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age. Vera Nazarian
• A “normal” person is the sort of person that might be designed by a committee. You know, “Each person puts in a pretty colour and it comes out gray.  Alan Sherman
• A life without limits is taking a cup of red dye and pouring it into the ocean, and watching the colour dilute into nothingness. Limited focus is putting that same cup of dye into a gallon of water. Leo Babauta
• Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age. Vera Nazarian
• Colouring outside the lines is a fine art. Kim Nance
• People are like M&Ms. They come in a variety of colours, they’re hard on the outside, and full of obscene yumminess on the inside. Michael Makai

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The world is a place of many skin colours …

• I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character. Martin Luther King, Jr.
• We may have different religions, different languages, different coloured skin, but we all belong to one human race. Kofi Annan
• Hating skin colour is contempt for God’s divine creative imagination. Honouring it is appreciation for conscious, beautiful- love- inspired diversity. F. Hodge
• It doesn’t matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I’m a woman or a man. John Lennon

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… like a garden of many coloured flowers …

• We are all flowers in the Great Spirit’s garden. We share a common root, and the root is Mother Earth.  The garden is beautiful because it has different colours in it, and those colours represent different traditions and cultural backgrounds. David Monongye
• Flowers

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… like a rainbow …

• What a privilege to be here on the planet to contribute your unique donation to humankind. Each face in the rainbow of colours that populate our world is precious and special. Morris Dees
• Rainbows

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… like a multi-coloured tapestry …

• America is not like a blanket—one piece of unbroken cloth. America is more like a quilt— many patches, many pieces, many colours, many sizes, all woven together by a common thread. Rev. Jesse Jackson
• We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their colour. Maya Angelou

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… like a box of crayons …

• We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box. Robert Fulghum

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Celebrate and love people of all colours

• If everyone would look for that uniqueness then we would have a very colourful world. Michael Schenker
• HELPED are those who love all the colours of all the human beings, as they love all the colours of the animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them. Alice Walker
• Diversity

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No one loves colour more than the artist

• My emotions are seriously stirred and twisted, but I will not let the dark void pull me in… the colours will show me the way… Eric Frantz
• Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them—in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures. John Ruskin
• We were always intoxicated with colour, with words that speak of colour, and with the sun that makes colours live. Andre Derain
• I love colour. I feel it inside me. It gives me a buzz. Damien Hirst
• Only those who love colour are admitted to its beauty and immanent presence. It affords utility to all, but unveils its deeper mysteries only to its devotees. Johannes Itten
• Art

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To the artist, colour can be a lifelong obsession

• Colour is my day-long obsession, joy and torment. Claude Monet
• Colours pursue me like a constant worry. They even worry me in my sleep. Claude Monet
• For me it is always the colour, first and foremost. Queen Margrethe II
• Colour possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Colour and I are one. I am a painter. Paul Klee
• I love to study the many things that grow below the corn stalks and bring them back to the studio to study the colour. If one could only catch that true colour of nature – the very thought of it drives me mad. Andrew Wyeth
• I am as curious about colour as one would be visiting a new country, because I have never concentrated so closely on colour expression. Up to now I have waited at the gates of the temple. Henri Matisse
• Colours come out of a tube pure; why is it that painters take such a long, indirect road to find them, searching for them in the light, in the shadows? Rodrigo Moynihan

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No one plays more with colour more than the artist

• Artists can colour the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must colour things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid. Jules Feiffer
• Colour, like everything else concerning visual expression, usually boils down to a gift, an innate sensibility and sensitivity. Ultimately, artists develop their own palette and colour sense. Scott Kahn
• The artist’s alertness to the colouristic demands of each picture, the ability to respond to the picture’s needs, to feed the colour until its appetite is satiated; these are the true measures of a colourist’s talent. Wolf Kahn
• On the sixth day, God created the artist, realizing no doubt that He had far from exhausted the uses of colour. Robert Brault
• As artists, we are most concerned with the behaviour of reflected light. When the reflected colours of the spectrum are curved around to form the familiar colour wheel, exciting relationships are revealed. Zoltan Szabo

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Painters use a palette of colours …

• Pallete: The range of colours used by a particular artist or in a particular picture. Oxford Dictionary
• Ah, Chardin, what you grind on your palette is not this colour or that… but the very substance of things. You dip your brush in air and light and spread them on your canvas. Denis Diderot
• He is all palette, and no painting. Peter William Brown
• I can smell it already, what colour I have on my palette… Bill Alexande

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… and these colours can be mixed to create endless combinations

• The idea that you mix a lot of colours and you get mud – I think is a load of crap. Mixing colours, you get all kinds of vibrating, muted colours. I prefer not to not mix the colours thoroughly – so the brushstrokes have distinct different colours within. Colin Poole
• Partially mixed colours, mixed on the paper, are more interesting than thoroughly mixed colours from the palette’s mixing area. Charles Reid
• Every so often change your palette. Introduce new colours and discard others. You will gain knowledge of colour mixing and your work will have added variety. Kenneth Denton
• If you thoroughly mix the colour on the palette, you will kill the colour. Mixing ahead of time only works when you’re painting the kitchen walls! Aleksander Titovets
• You must feel the colours that are necessary for you to mix your desired hue and value. Robert Wade
• A prettier grey can be made by mixing a colour with its near-complement… This is because the grey is closer in character to the colour being greyed. Michael Chesley Johnson
• The theory of not mixing black to darken colours really needs to be tossed out the window. Used sparingly, black can create wonderful, muted colours. Steve Childs
• It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colours, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colourist. Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form. Clive Bell
• A superb membrane of paint is a feast for the eye… applying the colours in transparent layers on an underpainting rather than mixing wet colours. Cornelis Le Mair
• Keep your shadows consistent. Premix your colours and then, later, if you want to come in and do a little tweekin’, to try to make it a little bit more interesting and show a little bit of reflection into the shadow colour, you can do that, but do it [with] subtlety. Daniel Edmondson
• See what you can do with your daring with colour and your ignorance mixed with it. Charles Hawthorne

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Colour is at the very heart of painting …

• Colour in a picture is like enthusiasm in Life. Vincent van Gogh
• If light is the spiritual quality of painting, colour is surely its heart and passion. Robert Reynolds
• The older I get, the more I feel that colour is what painting is. Painting is primarily colour. Joseph Raffael
• Ah, Chardin, what you grind on your palette is not this colour or that… but the very substance of things. You dip your brush in air and light and spread them on your canvas. Denis Diderot
• Colour is the pulse of the painting. Michele Cooper
• Art is your personal diary where you may colour your thoughts and emotions on a page. Sara
• Art without colour would lose much of its purpose. Andrew Loomis

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… and has a huge effect on a painting

• Colour in certain places has the great value of making the outlines and structural planes seem more energetic. Antonio Gaudi
• Colours in painting are as allurements for persuading the eyes, as the sweetness of meter is in poetry. Nicolas Poussin
• Colour creates, enhances, changes, reveals and establishes the mood of the painting. Kiff Holland
• A variation of edges, along with the proper value, allows the artist to draw attention to or away from different areas of the painting… Likewise, use of colour draws attention to an area… Kenn Backhaus
• When the colour achieves richness, the form attains its fullness also. Paul Cezanne

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Painting is drawing with colour

• Painting is drawing, with the additional means of colour. Painting without drawing is just ‘colouriness,’ colour excitement. To think of colour for colour’s sake is like thinking of sound for sound’s sake. Colour is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form. John Sloan
• I still come closest to success with drawing. When I use colour the results are dubious, for these painfully gained experiences bear less fruit. Paul Klee

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Painting is a mosaic of colours working together

• Painting is a mosaic of colours weaved into a seamless whole. Igor Babailov

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Colour can be taught …

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

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… for there is theory to it …

• All students need to know about colour is the basic colour wheel and complimentary colours. There are many books on colour theory; do not waste your time and money. Sergei Bongart
• After many hours of colour theory, colour wheels, mixing, and value studies, I began to realize that maybe it was best just to let it all go, and paint. Lorna Dockstader
• Colour is so much a matter of direct and immediate perception that any discussion of theory needs to be accompanied by experiments with the colours themselves. Walter Sargent
• Beware of colour theories. Theories in colour photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point. Ernst Haas
• Colour is uncontainable. It effortlessly reveals the limits of language and evades our best attempts to impose a rational order on it… To work with colour is to become acutely aware of the insufficiency of language and theory – which is both disturbing and pleasurable. David Batchelor
• I have no system regarding palettes, arrangement, number of colours, etc. I know very little about pigments or even colour theory– everything I do is quite intuitive. Nicholas Simmons
• There is no model; there is only colour. Paul Cezanne

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…but mastering colour is not easy

• It is only after years of struggle and deprivation that the young artist should touch colour – and then only in the company of his betters. El Greco

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To some, colour comes naturally …

• Some of us come on earth seeing – some of us come on earth seeing colour. Louise Nevelson
• The point is to know how to use the colours, the choice of which is, when all’s said and done, a matter of habit. Claude Monet
• Perhaps colour, what the individual expects from it, and how he approaches the use of it, is an ingrained ‘thing,’ very much like the knowledge of the laws of one’s own land… Jen Lacoste

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… especially to the colourist

• Draughtsmen may be made, but colourists are born. Eugene Delacroix
• Pure draughtsmen are philosophers and dialecticians. Colourists are epic poets. Charles Baudelaire
• It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colours, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colourist. Colour becomes significant only when it becomes form. Clive Bell
• Being a true colourist means demonstrating discipline by first assessing all the options laid out before you, and then giving equal regard to hues beyond the brightest in your quiver. Scott L. Christensen

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As an artist, choose your palette carefully

• Take the time to make the correct colour for your painting once – so you paint 7 paintings one time rather than 1 painting 7 times! Andrew Hamilton
• My own palette has been reduced to three primaries and white. I usually add a couple of greys as values to modify colour and tone. Scott L. Christensen
• Every so often change your palette. Introduce new colours and discard others. You will gain knowledge of colour mixing and your work will have added variety. Kenneth Denton
• Partially mixed colours, mixed on the paper, are more interesting than thoroughly mixed colours from the palette’s mixing area. Charles Reid
• The greatest masterpieces were once only pigments on a palette. Henry S. Hoskins
• The pigments on a palette represent a series of parts waiting to be unified. Ian Semple
• I forcibly liberated my palette to one red, one blue and one yellow. Why am I amazed that I can produce pretty well all the colours I want from three primaries? Pepper Hume
• Economy should be studiously avoided in the setting of the palette; there is nothing more likely to give a bad style in oil painting than insufficiency of colours. John Collier
• I think palettes can be quite telling. Mine is orderly and clean and well… precise… laid out from light top to dark bottom. And then there are those artists’ palettes I think are so much fun! Heaps of vibrant gooey oil paint just waiting for brush. Absolutely delicious! Peggy Woolsey
• Who ever heard of a musician who was passionately fond of B flat? Colour is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form. John Sloan
• What, you haven’t any ivory-black on your palette? If you think you are going to make black with blue and red, I can’t have you in my class. You might stir up trouble with such ideas. Fernand Corman
• On the whole, the modern palette is the same as the one used by the artists of Pompeii… I mean it has not been enriched. The ancients used earths, ochres, and ivory-black – you can do anything with that palette. Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• For a warm earthy palette, add Raw Umber, Cadmium Red Light, Burnt Umber and Olive Green. Lisa Buck-Goldstein

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Choosing colour can be an act of logic and reason …

• There is a logic of colours, and it is with this alone, and not with the logic of the brain, that the painter should conform. Paul Cezanne
• You reason colour more than you reason drawing… Colour has a logic as severe as form. Pierre Bonnard
• Drawing is feeling. Colour is an act of reason. Pierre Bonnard
• My colours are logically chosen. Mark Kostabi
• Reason,  Logic

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… but it ‘s also important to use colour spontaneously and intuitively without overthinking it

• Colour has always been easy. There are times when I don’t even look at what I’m reaching for until it is on the picture. Lyle Carbajal
• I don’t start with a colour order, but find the colours as I go. Helen Frankenthaler
• I have no system regarding palettes, arrangement, number of colours, etc. I know very little about pigments or even colour theory– everything I do is quite intuitive. Nicholas Simmons
• To play your colours by eye is worse than playing the piano by ear. John Sloan
• The trick is to make colour relationships work, using a combination of logical colour principles and your intuition. Nita Leland
• Learn to reach for colours instinctively, not automatically. Instinctively implies knowledge, sensitivity and perception. Automatically implies a mechanical reaction and a process that’s akin to a formula. Robert Wade
• I plan colours ahead of time only in a general sense. I have found that if I try to force the paint to do what I want, I miss valuable input from the watercolour process. As a result, the colours grow and change as the painting grows and changes. Carol Ann Schrader
• Spontaneity,  Intuition

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Use your emotions to choose colours for colour must be felt

• Who told you that one paints with colours? One makes use of colours, but one paints with emotions. Jean-Baptiste- Simeon Chardin
• I never do colour sketches. I do colour on the canvas. I have always felt that in order to be a good painter one should be colour- blind, because colour doesn’t have to be seen. It only needs to be felt. Richard Lindner
• You must feel the colours that are necessary for you to mix your desired hue and value. Robert Wade
• Colour in colour is felt at any and every place of the pictorial organization; in its immediacy – its particularity. Colour must be felt throughout. Jules Olitski
• Colour is the daily bread of the eyes. It is not only seen but also must be felt. Frank Webb
• Colour is, on the evidence of language alone, very bound up with the feelings. Joanna Field
• Emotion

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Experiment with different colour combinations

• I began to analyse watercolours by the masters: Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, J.M.W. Turner, and John Singer Sargent… their clarity of colour resulted from, yes, a touch of genius, but also from a sincere dedication to the medium. They were patient enough to experiment and formulate effective colour combinations. Jim Kosvanec
• Experimentation

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Express emotion through your colours

• Colour should be used to depict the three major emotions in a man’s life – anticipation, realization and retrospection. Ernest Lawson
• I find great pleasure in using colour out of context to express emotion and to entertain the viewer. Carlton Plummer

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Don’t be scared to use big dabs of vibrant  colour …

• No small dabs of colour – you want plenty of paint to paint with. John Singer Sargent
• Colour that has been built up in stages has a different character than a solitary layer of colour. Plying in several layers of pigment, weaving each colour on top of the last, creates a richness of hue that is otherwise unobtainable. Richard McDaniel
• I applied streaks and blobs of colours onto the canvas with a palette knife, and I made them sing with all the intensity I could… Wassily Kandinsky
• I cannot pretend to be impartial about the colours. I rejoice with the brilliant ones, and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns. Winston Churchill
• I sometimes go for the strongest, most vivid colour on the palette, which in the case of movies is violence. Brian de Palma
• It must be vivid. Extended in space and time, the dots accrue, giving back pathways, constellations, geometries, and at last, as the white ground of the canvas is overcome, unforeseen colour sensations. Andrew Forge

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… but know there is also time for restraint …

• Full, saturated colours have an emotional significance I want to avoid. Lucian Freud
• All colour is no colour. Sir Kenneth Clark

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… for there are times when less colour can be more

• A colourist makes his presence known even in a simple charcoal drawing. Henri Matisse
• With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour. Theodore Gericault
• I’ve come to realize that where harmony is concerned, more can be achieved with less colour. Scott L. Christensen
• Colour can overwhelm… One must understand that when it comes to colour, ‘less’ is often ‘more’ – lesson taught us by the masters but ignored by many artists. Joe Singer
• Colour is a powerful physical, biological, and psychological force. When less colour and less intense colour is present, trace amounts and subtle differences become highly significant and are strongly felt. John Paul Caponigro
• Colour is like cooking. The cook puts in more or less salt, that’s the difference! Josef Albers

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Try limiting your palette to just a few select colours …

• Two colours are enough, just blue and white – more might be a nightmare. Jennifer Kostuik
• I forcibly liberated my palette to one red, one blue and one yellow. Why am I amazed that I can produce pretty well all the colours I want from three primaries? Pepper Hume
• Little by little, I’ve reached the stage of using only a small number of forms and colours. It’s not the first time that painting has been done with a very narrow range of colours. The frescoes of the tenth century are painted like this. For me, they are magnificent things. Joan Miro
• A good painter needs only three colours: black, white and red. Titian
• Any yellow, any blue, any red and a white are all I need. Andrew McDermott
• With a limited palette, the older painters could do just as well as today… what they did was sounder. Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• My personal theory is that being frugal with the number of colours, one gets to know them intimately and to understand how each reacts with the others. Ron Ranson

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… but don’t limit it too much

• Good colour really means good taste; and ‘powerful’ colour means a reserve, to give a climax its full force, and not ‘red, white, and blue all over. John F. Carlson
• I wouldn’t use the same colour in a picture in more than one place. Robert Rauschenberg

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Let nature inspire your choice and use of colour

• Every day advanced the passing of the leaf, and soon our painters had to go in quest of the desirable ‘spot of red.’ The hills that had been crimson and scarlet with maple were changed to purplish grey. The yellow leaves were following fast. They realized one night of breaking cloud that there was a growing moon, and they looked at old star friends from the car door – the Dipper lying flat among the spruce tops, and one rare night bright Capella dimmed in a jet of Aurora. After such a night, the trees could resist no longer, and they saw many a one cast off all her leaves in one desperate shower. Birch woods, that were dense yellow in the morning were open grey by night. But the wild cherry leaves still hung as though the high fifes and violins were to finish the great concert of colour. They were another of the notable little graces of the bush, daintily hung in every shade from palest yellow to deep crimson against the big blue- gold hills of the Montreal Valley. J. E. H. MacDonald
• All the earth colours of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands… Georgia O’Keeffe
• I often collect small twiggs, leaves or rocks and have learned a lot about seeing colour by doing this. The twigs vary in colour from olive green to gold to burgundy and I’ve only ever seen a few brown ones. Even the needles on a spruce tree have a wonderful range of colours and colour is what inspires me to do a painting. Lorna Dockstader
• I was walking along a road one evening – on one side lay the city, and below me was the fjord. The sun went down – the clouds were stained red, as if with blood. I felt as though the whole of nature was screaming – it seemed as though I could hear a scream. I painted that picture, painting the clouds like real blood. The colours screamed. Edvard Munch
• You must try to match your colours as nearly as you can to those you see before you, and you must study the effects of light and shade on nature’s own hues and tints. William Merritt Chase
• Form your own colour concept of things in nature. I have no rules for fine colour to give you. John Sloan
• The sun rose brilliantly above, reflecting the hues of red, orange, lavender and blue in the pond before me. The viridian shadows changed to lemon yellow and lime green as the light washed the morning and I tried in vain to save a piece of this miracle on canvas. Mary Erickson
• The objects in front of you are flowers, but the subject is colour. Michele Cooper
• Nature

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Don’t be too anal about your colour selection …

• The artist who pictures sounds as colours, who feels the difference in microns between one sea green and another… is not attending to what the world considers important. Eric Maisel

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… for there are always a myriad of colour choices that will work

• There are always a myriad of colour choices that will work in any situation, as long as the tonal value is appropriate. Gaye Adams
• If the tones are balanced, you can use almost any colour. Janine Parsons

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Use a dominant colour to make your painting unique

• Allow one colour, or just a couple of analogous colours, to dominate the mood of the painting; and let the others fulfil a supporting role. Zoltan Szabo
• A dominant colour possesses tremendous power in making a painting unique. Mary Bassi
• I first search for the colour that will be the heart of my work… the rest of the colours are academic. Linda Walker

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Use colour to create a strong impression

• A colour is as strong as the impression it creates. Ivan Albright

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Try pushing colours to the extreme

• Any colour works if you push it to the extreme. Massimo Vignellinat
• It almost always happens that true, but exaggerated, colouring is more agreeable than absolute colouring. Michel Eugene Chevreul

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Use colours you really like

• I advise students on the subject of colour as follows: If it looks good enough to eat, use it. Abe Ajay

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Keep an open mind when it comes to colour selection

• Sometimes when I’m having a colour moment I think to myself, okay what would be the most disgusting colour to add here? Sometimes that ‘disgusting’ can turn out to be ‘surprising’ and ‘completely gorgeous’. Angela A’Court

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Dare to take risks and break rules …

• No one ever discovered anything new by colouring inside the lines. Thomas Vasquez
• See what you can do with your daring with colour and your ignorance mixed with it. Charles Hawthorne

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… for no rule can be said to always apply

• Buying watercolour paints requires that you know the colours and their confusing and seemingly inconsistent nomenclature. No standardization exists… Hilary Page
• Colour 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 colour has with forms, and the statement you’re trying to make. Roy Lichtenstein

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Don’t mix your temperatures

• It doesn’t matter whether the overall feeling of the colour in a painting is warm or cool, it just shouldn’t try to be both. Marion Boddy- Evans

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Don’t over-mix your colours

• If you thoroughly mix the colour on the palette, you will kill the colour. Mixing ahead of time only works when you’re painting the kitchen walls! Aleksander Titovets

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Don’t leave room for regret

• It’s a waste of time to think that if you coloured a painting red what might have happened if you painted it black. Yoko Ono
• Regret

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Always consider what effect colours will have on each other and how you can use that

• In painting, whether colour reflection is apparent or not, every hue must echo neighbouring hues, so that homogeneity may be attained. Walter J. Phillips
• In order to change a colour, it is enough to change the colour of its background. Michel Eugene Chevreul
• I will use contrasting colours to disrupt an area of colour that I find too harmonious, until a new harmony or an interesting clash occurs. Jean-Claude Langer
• If you use colour carefully, that is, placing a softer ‘off’ colour next to pure colour, it helps add the magic touch to your work – and that special look. Gail Boyle

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Advice on specific colours choices and colour combinations

• To any white body receiving the light from the sun, or the air, the shadows will be of a bluish cast. Leonardo da Vinci
• There is no blue without yellow and without orange, and if you put in blue, then you must put in yellow, and orange too, mustn’t you? Oh well, you will tell me that what I write to you are only banalities. Vincent van Gogh
• Reds, yellows and oranges conjure up sunlight and fire, while the blues and blue-greens evoke snow and ice, sea, sky and moonlight.
• Red is passion-lit, orange is flowerageous, yellow is suntastic, pink is lipsensual, green is lifebursting, blue is skyful, purple is berrydancing, gray is cloudrainy. Terri Guillemets
• For a warm earthy palette, add Raw Umber, Cadmium Red Light, Burnt Umber and Olive Green. Lisa Buck-Goldstein
• Nature is more depth than surface. Hence the need to introduce into our light vibrations represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air. Paul Cezanne
• My own palette has been reduced to three primaries and white. I usually add a couple of grays as values to modify colour and tone. Scott L. Christensen
• In an atmosphere of uniform density, the most distant things seen through it, such as the mountains, in consequence of the great quantity of atmosphere which is between your eye and them, will appear blue. Therefore, you should make the building… wall which is more distant less defined and bluer… five times as far away, make five times as blue. Leonardo da Vinci
• I entreat fresh visions from the painters. Be lavish with your vermilion to portray the mountains in the spring. Lu Xun

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More advice on use of colour in painting

• I always lay out my colour in the same way so I don’t have to stop and search for the colour I want. I press the paint out in long ribbons rather than blobs. It keeps the paint cleaner and less contaminated by other colours. Linda Blondheim
• When painting the faces of young persons… use the yolk of the egg of a city hen, because they have lighter yolks than those of country hens. Cennino Cennini
• To achieve depth the colour has to penetrate the paper. Shanti Panchal
• Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by colour. Chuck Jones
• Trying to brighten a dull colour is nearly impossible… I start with a colour that is too intense so I can calm it as needed. Jane Jones

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Most people have a favourite colour

• I am crazy about two colours: carmine and cobalt. Cobalt is a divine colour and there is nothing so beautiful for creating atmosphere. Carmine is as warm and lively as wine… the same with emerald green. Vincent van Gogh
• I only use three primaries, so the nice thing is I can’t have favorite colours. Chuck Close
• When you want full colour perception, you must give up preferring some colours only partially seen and hating others, for you can only hate one aspect of a colour, not a whole colour, it seems, hate being blind, like ‘love.’ William Tapley
• The best colour in the whole world, is the one that looks good, on you! Coco Chanel
• Raw umber is my favourite colour. Whenever I see that colour, I can see and smell leaves and new beginnings. Colour is felt, after all. Thomas William Jones
• My favourite colour on canvas is nudity. Jarod Kintz
• My favourite colour is a soft shade of ‘Outright Totality,’ but often I am lured by hues of ‘Habitat’ or a stunning tone of ‘Subconscious.’ Jacques Vesery
• My favourite colour to glaze with is yellow. It always glows just like stained glass lit up by the sun. Jane Jones
• Having a favourite colour is like having a favourite lung. Sara Genn
• Oh yes! He loved yellow, did good Vincent… When the two of us were together in Arles, both of us insane, and constantly at war over beautiful colours, I adored red; where could I find a perfect vermilion? Paul Gauguin
• I am attracted to generic or ‘industrial’ colours; paper bag brown, file cabinet gray, industrial green, that kind of thing. Robert Mangold
• Never has a pigment been better named than ultramarine blue. Fashionable, even today, in its nomenclature! It is ultra in every way. Karen Fitzgerald

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Some hate certain colours

• Purplish brown? Let’s agree it / is a colour so bad we all flee it / it has no good use / so let’s name it Puce / from the sound we make when we see it. Darby Bannard
• What a horrible thing yellow is. Edgar Degas

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Thoughts on blue

• Almost without exception, blue refers to the domain of abstraction and immateriality. Wassily Kandinsky
• Blue colour is everlastingly appointed by the deity to be a source of delight. John Ruskin
• Blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not… All colours arouse specific associative ideas… while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract. Yves Klein
• Blue is the colour to choose when creativity is a priority. People are less literal and more exploratory with blue… Blue is open, free, and peaceful. Dr. Juliet Zhu
• Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two. Franz Marc
• Blue is the only colour which maintains its own character in all its tones… it will always stay blue; whereas yellow is blackened in its shades, and fades away when lightened; red when darkened becomes brown, and diluted with white is no longer red, but another colour – pink. Raoul Dufy
• Vermeer’s blues are silent, but they touch your soul. Jonathan Jones
• There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
• Let the blue sky meet the blue sea and all is blue for a time. Moncy Barbour

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Thoughts on red

• I choose colour on the spur of the moment. People ask me why I paint in red. I do not have the slightest idea. I was painting in blue, then I had a need to paint in red. To be able to interact with the medium, this is the key. There are no sure ways to do art. Guido Molinari
• I love hot red and yet I am always in drab gray clothing. I use green sparingly in my paintings yet a large field of green grass brings tears to my eyes. Still, it all makes sense. It is a love of colour and what it does for our lives. Harley Brown
• When I haven’t any blue I use red. Pablo Picasso
• You can’t go wrong with the use of red; every painting should have red in it. George De Groat
• Painters use red like spice. Derek Jarman
• A thimbleful of red is redder than a bucketful. Henri Matisse
• Did the poet use red to symbolize blood? Anger? Lust? Or is the wheelbarrow simply red because red sounded better than black? Jay Asher
• Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. Eugene Delacroix
• Everything utilitarian needs a little red edge. Reno Dakota
• Getting that blood red in the nose and the cheeks and the ears that stands in contrast to the greens or the neutral colours, that’s the dance of flesh tone. Mark Carder
• I want a red to be sonorous, to sound like a bell. If it doesn’t turn out that way, I add more reds and other colours until I get it. Pierre- Auguste Renoir
• If one says ‘red’ – the name of colour – and there are fifty people listening, it can be expected that there will be fifty reds in their minds. And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different. Josef Albers
• The ‘pure’ red of which certain abstractionists speak does not exist. Any red is rooted in blood, glass, wine, hunters’ caps and a thousand other concrete phenomena. Otherwise we would have no feeling toward red and its relations… Robert Motherwell
• Red is a colour I’ve felt very strongly about. Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it’s one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level. Anish Kapoor
• Red protects itself. No colour is as territorial. It stakes a claim, is on the alert against the spectrum. Derek Jarman
• Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it’s inside out, red. Anish Kapoor
• My mother warned me to avoid things coloured red. Claes Oldenburg
• Of all the hues, reds have the most potency. If there is one electric blue, a dozen reds are so charged. Use them to punctuate white, burn into bronzes, or dynamite black. Jack Lenor Larsen

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Thoughts on green

• As a picture painted in yellow always radiates spiritual warmth, or as one in blue has apparently a cooling effect, so green is only boring. Wassily Kandinsky
• I sometimes use a lot of light greens and greys when I feel there is sadness in the painting. Robert Ryan
• There were apples painted in pale green and bright red on a ground of emerald green leaves. It is all colour. One might say it was a Cezanne. Maurice Denis
• When students were given creativity tests, those whose test-cover pages had a green background gave more creative answers than those whose pages were white, blue, red or grey. Sue Shellenbarger
• Absolute green is the most restful colour, lacking any undertone of joy, grief, or passion. On exhausted men, this restfulness has a beneficial effect, but after a time it becomes tedious. Wassily Kandinsky
• It’s not easy being green. Kermit the Frog, Muppet
• Green is the prime colour of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises. Pedro Calderon de la Barca
• Green represents the dead image of life. Rudolf Steiner
• He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. Oscar Wilde
• Visit a green place to understand green. Susan Easton Burns
• In the hierarchy of colours, green represents the social middle class, self-satisfied, immovable, narrow… Wassily Kandinsky

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Thoughts on red, yellow and blue

• 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… Sir Joshua Reynolds
• The distinct blue, red, and yellow colours… though they have not the kind of harmony which is produced by a variety of broken and transparent colours, have the effect of grandeur. Sir Joshua Reynolds
• Reds, yellows and oranges conjure up sunlight and fire, while the blues and blue-greens evoke snow and ice, sea, sky and moonlight.
• Nature is more depth than surface. Hence the need to introduce into our light vibrations represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air. Paul Cezanne

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Thoughts on yellow

• What a horrible thing yellow is. Edgar Degas
• A yellow room gives you perpetual sunshine. Steve Hovland
• How lovely yellow is! It stands for the sun. Vincent van Gogh
• The yellow glistens. / It glistens with various yellows, / Citrons, oranges and greens / Flowering over the skin. Wallace Stevens
• My favourite colour to glaze with is yellow. It always glows just like stained glass lit up by the sun. Jane Jones
• Indian yellow, banned. Cows were poisoned with mango leaves and the colour was made from their urine. It is the bright yellow in Indian miniatures. Although yellow occupies one-twentieth of the spectrum, it is the brightest colour. Derek Jarman

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Thoughts on pink

• Pink is not just a colour, it’s an attitude.
• Mauve? Mauve is just pink trying to be purple. James Abbott McNeill Whistler
• Almost all words do have colour and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her too. Gladys Taber

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Thoughts on orange

• Why did you choose orange as the colour for The Gates?’ Karen Wright ‘SAFFRON! SAFFRON! They are SAFFRON!’ Jean-Claude
• Everyone knows that yellow, orange, and red suggest ideas of joy and plenty. Eugene Delacroix
• Orange is one of God’s favourite colours— He stuck it right there between red and yellow as the second colour in the rainbow. He decorates entire forests with shades of orange every autumn. It shows up in sunrises at the start of the day, sunsets at the end of the day, and in the glow of the moon at the right time of night. Reggie Joiner
• Used throughout a room, orange can become surprisingly neutral, and yet it can be bright and mood-enhancing. Jonathan Adler

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Thoughts on black

• With all their damned talk of modern painting, I’ve been forty years discovering that the queen of all colours is black! Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• How do you paint yellow wheat against a yellow sky? You paint it jet black. Ben Shahn
• What, you haven’t any ivory-black on your palette? If you think you are going to make black with blue and red, I can’t have you in my class. You might stir up trouble with such ideas. Fernand Corman
• Any colour, so long as it’s black. Henry Ford
• As an artist, I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a colour but as a non-colour and as the absence of colour. Ad Reinhardt
• Black is not a colour. Edouard Manet
• Black is like a broken vessel, which is deprived of the capacity to contain anything. Leonardo da Vinci
• I fell in love with black; it contained all colour. It wasn’t a negation of colour… Black is the most aristocratic colour of all… You can be quiet, and it contains the whole thing. Louise Nevelson
• Through a process of trial and error and experimentation, I discovered the simplest method – using only black – produced work with the strongest visual impact installed. Paul Russo
• There’s something about black. You feel hidden away in it. Georgia O’Keeffe
• There is an undeniable virtue to a true black; allowing the brain to be mesmerized and pulling the pupils deep into that unfound but sensed abyss. Jamie Lavin
• The theory of not mixing black to darken colours really needs to be tossed out the window. Used sparingly, black can create wonderful, muted colours. Steve Childs
• Regarding black, even black people are not black. They are simply way more colourful than white people. Luke Charchuk

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Thoughts on white

• White is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
• Renoir said once that nothing was so difficult, and at the same time so exciting, to paint, as white on white. Ambroise Vollard
• Working in white makes people look into it. White is ethereal. There’s a purity to it, it makes things look elevated in a way. There’s a whole palette of white… Jonathan Milne
• White is poison to a picture: use it only in highlights. Peter Paul Rubens
• White is going to lighten things as well as cool them down, in general. Be aware of this… Colin Poole
• White covers a multitude of sins. Jonathan Milne
• White does not exist in nature. Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• When you glaze on a bright white ground it is like looking through colour rather than at it – like looking through stained glass. Fred Machetanz
• If time were a colour, I bet it would be a tasteful off-white. Greg Parrish
• Put variety in white. Charles Hawthorne
• My husband’s like, ‘Could you make it look like a guy lives here? Why is everything white?’ Tamara Taggart
• Never use pure white; it doesn’t exist in nature. A. T. Hibbard

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Thoughts on grey

• If I see everything in grey, and in grey all the colours which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other colour? I’ve tried doing so, for it was never my intention to paint only with grey. But in the course of my work I have eliminated one colour after another, and what has remained is grey, grey, grey! Alberto Giacometti
• Remember the enemy of all painting is grey: a painting will almost always appear greyer than it is, on account of its oblique position under the light. Eugene Delacroix
• The enemies of grey… are fond of bringing forward the argument that colours suffer in grey weather, and that strong sunlight is necessary to all the hues of heaven and earth…. It is true that sun is needed to burnish and bring into bloom the tertiary and dubious colours; the colour of peat, pea-soup, Impressionist sketches, brown velvet coats, olives, grey and blue slates, the complexions of vegetarians, the tints of volcanic rock, chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old boots; the delicate shades of these do need the sunlight to bring out the faint beauty that often clings to them. .. if you choke your garden with poppies and geraniums, if you paint your house sky-blue and scarlet, if you wear, let us say, a golden top-hat and a crimson frock-coat, you will not only be visible on the greyest day, but you will notice that your costume and environment produce a certain singular effect…. rich colours actually look more luminous on a grey day, because they are seen against a sombre background and seem to be burning with a lustre of their own. G.K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, “The Glory of Grey”
• A prettier grey can be made by mixing a colour with its near-complement… This is because the grey is closer in character to the colour being greyed. Michael Chesley Johnson
• Better gray than garishness. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
• Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a “colourless” day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour…. A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens. G.K. Chesterton
• It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate… It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make ‘nothing’ visible. Gerhard Richter
• If you take an intense colour and put an intense complement next to it without graying it, it’s very hot. The grey allows the eye to do the visual mixing. Simmie Knox
• The use of reds, yellows or blues in profusion is not good art, but if considerable grey is added, this softens their effect and shows them to advantage. A. C. Leighton
• The colour of truth is grey. Andre Gide
• The fundamental grey, which differentiates the masters, expresses them, is the soul of all colour. Odilon Redon
• Speed kills colour… the gyroscope, when turning at full speed, shows up gray. Paul Morand

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Thoughts on violet

• With all its excesses, the modern impressionistic movement has given us one discovery, the colour violet. It is the only discovery of importance in the art world since Velazquez. Joaquin Sorolla
• Violet has the shortest wavelength of the spectrum. Behind it, the invisible ultraviolet. Roses are Red, Violets are Blue. Poor violet, violated for a rhyme. Derek Jarman

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Thoughts on black and white

• Women think of all colours except the absence of colour. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony. Coco Chanel
• When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls! Ted Grant
• At one side of the palette there is white, at the other black; and neither is ever used neat. Winston Churchill
• Black and white are absolute… expressing the most delicate vibration, the most profound tranquillity, and unlimited profundity. Shiko Munakata
• I make black and white prints because I want to go back to the beginning. Shiko Munakata
• I work in black and white, then go from there. Deon Venter
• The world is not black and white. More like black and grey. Henry Graham Greene
• One very important difference between colour and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in colour you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty… absolute certainty. Paul Outerbridge
• The great black and white draftsman, the sculptor, and the blind man know that form and colour are separate. The form itself is what the blind man knows… Colour is surface skin that fits over the form. John Sloan
• Suffice it to say that black and white are also colours… for their simultaneous contrast is as striking as that of green and red, for instance. Vincent van Gogh
• It’s hard to live your life in colour, and tell the truth in black and white. Gregg Allman
• It is wonderful how much depends upon the relations of black and white… A black and white, if properly balanced, suggests colour. Winslow Homer

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Thoughts on gold

• Golden is a surface colour. Ludwig Wittgenstein

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The colour of wine

• If Bacchus ever had a colour he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat’s ‘purple- stained mouth,’ or perhaps even of Homer’s dangerously wine-dark sea. Victoria Finlay

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The colour of stones

• In precious opals, there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the centre, perhaps, a flirtatious glance of green. But each stone flickers with a unique fire and a good opal is one with an opinion of its own. Victoria Finlay
• Lapis lazulis is the crystal colour and stone one should wear for tapping into one’s creativity. Mary Jean Mailloux

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Each day has its own colour

• People observe the colours of a day only at its beginnings and its ends, but to me it’s quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colours. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them. Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
• Each day has a colour, a smell. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
• Each day has its own individuality of colour. Charles Hawthorne
• Somewhere, out at the edges, the night / Is turning and the waves of darkness / Begin to brighten the shore of dawn… The heavy dark falls back to earth / And the freed air goes wild with light, / The heart fills with fresh, bright breath / And thoughts stir to give birth to colour John O’Donohue

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The colour of the night

• I often think that the night is more alive and more richly coloured than the day. Vincent van Gogh
• All colours will agree in the dark. Francis Bacon

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The colour of the moon

• My father pointed to the moon and asked me what colour it was. I couldn’t tell. So, he told me to look at the horizon and then glance back quickly at the moon. Then I saw it: it was pale green! Alden Baker
• Reds, yellows and oranges conjure up sunlight and fire, while the blues and blue-greens evoke snow and ice, sea, sky and moonlight.

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The colour of eyes

• Most eyes have more than one colour, but usually they’re related. Blue eyes may have two shades of blue, or blue and grey, or blue and green, or even a fleck or two of brown. Most people don’t notice that. Elizabeth Moon
• My eyes are greyish blueish green, but I’m told they look orange in the night. Shel Silverstein
• Imagine someone pointing to a place in the iris of a Rembrandt eye and saying, ‘The walls of my room should be painted this colour.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein

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The colour of crayons

• We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box. Robert Fulghum
• Colour your life with a full box of crayons
• If you want an interesting party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone. Robert Fulghum
• Life is about using the whole box of crayons. RuPaul
• Life is like a box of crayons. Most people are the eight-colour boxes, but what you’re really looking for are the 64-colour boxes with the sharpeners on the back. I fancy myself to be a 64-colour box, though I’ve got a few missing. It’s okay though, because I’ve got some more vibrant colours like periwinkle at my disposal. I have a bit of a problem though in that I can only meet the eight-colour boxes. Does anyone else have that problem? I mean, there are so many different colours of life, of feeling, of articulation, so when I meet someone who’s an eight-colour type I’m like, “hey girl, magenta!” and she’s like, “oh, you mean purple!” and she goes off on her purple thing, and I’m like, “no — I want magenta!” John Mayer
• May your life be full of colour and your crayons never melt.

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The colour of the sunset and sunrise

• I saw a sunset in Queretaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal. Jorge Luis Borges
• As artist Nature splashes colour across the vast canvas of the sky with the radiance and splendour of sunrise and sunset. She arches rainbows against the passing storm, creates flowers and foliage, sets autumn woods on fire with the beauty of turning leaves and touches mountaintops with snow crystals. Wilferd A. Peterson
• The sky is the soul of all scenery. It makes the earth lovely at sunrise and splendid at sunset. In the one it breathes over the earth a crystal-like ether, in the other a liquid gold. Thomas Cole
• It is the sense of unfamiliar envelopment that is impressive, whether in the living grays of hoarfrost, the crimson of the heavens at sunset, or the golden suffusions of autumn. Walter J. Phillips
• Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age. Vera Nazarian
• Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky. Rabindranath Tagore
• Sunset is still my favourite colour, and rainbow is second. Mattie Stepanek
• Orange is one of God’s favourite colours— He stuck it right there between red and yellow as the second colour in the rainbow. He decorates entire forests with shades of orange every autumn. It shows up in sunrises at the start of the day, sunsets at the end of the day, and in the glow of the moon at the right time of night. Reggie Joiner
• Sunrise and sunset

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The colour of the sky

• The artist, busy and unsettled, can find a moment’s peace – and even whole-being rejuvenation – by quietly attuning to a red sky, a gray sky, a black sky, a blue sky. Eric Maisel
• Such a magnificent sky, and it’s nothing but white paper! Pierre-Auguste Renoir
• Artists can colour the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must colour things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid. Jules Feiffer
• As artist Nature splashes colour across the vast canvas of the sky with the radiance and splendour of sunrise and sunset. Wilferd A. Peterson
• Heavens, how charming it is! There is now in the sky only the soft vaporous colour of pale citron – the last reflection of the sun which plunges into the dark blue of the night, going from green tones to a pale turquoise of an unheard-of fineness and a fluid delicacy quite indescribable… Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
• The sky is the soul of all scenery. It makes the earth lovely at sunrise and splendid at sunset. In the one it breathes over the earth a crystal-like ether, in the other a liquid gold. Thomas Cole
• Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age. Vera Nazarian
• Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add colour to my sunset sky. Rabindranath Tagore
• A red apple isn’t red, nor the lemon yellow. The sky is seldom blue, only when it isn’t… Keith Crown
• Reds, yellows and oranges conjure up sunlight and fire, while the blues and blue-greens evoke snow and ice, sea, sky and moonlight.
• Let the blue sky meet the blue sea and all is blue for a time. Moncy Barbour
• The sky

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The colour of the rainbow

• A smart walk through a gallery from a fifteenth century to a sixteenth century, and then a seventeenth century room will reveal how in successive centuries the brilliancy of oil picture diminishes… A. P. Laurie
• Don’t miss all the beautiful colours of the rainbow looking for that pot of gold.
• In Autumn, you can take one maple leaf and see almost all the colours of the rainbow in it – although you would need your imagination to see blue. Dorthe Eisenhardt
• In my soul, I am still that small child who did not care about anything else but the beautiful colours of a rainbow. Papiha Ghosh
• It’s a good thing that when God created the rainbow he didn’t consult a decorator or he would still be picking colours. Sam Levenson
• Life is like a rainbow. You need both the sun and the rain to make its colour appear.
• Love was a feeling completely bound up with colour, like thousands of rainbows superimposed one on top of the other. Paulo Coelho
• May your journey through life be vibrant and full of colourful rainbows. Harley King
• My teacher asked my favourite colour. … I said ‘Rainbow’…. and I was punished to stand out of my class. Saket Assertive
• Sometimes it’s important to work for that pot of gold. But other times it’s essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which colour to slide down on the rainbow. Douglas Pagels
• Sunset is still my favourite colour, and rainbow is second. Mattie Stepanek
• The last mad throb of red just as it turns green; the ultimate shriek of orange calling all the blues of heaven for relief and support… each colour almost regains the fun it must have felt within itself on forming the first rainbow. Charles Demuth
• Rainbows

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The colour of water

• I’m intrigued that one can recognize different parts of the world solely by the particular colour of the water. Leonard Mizerek
• God is the colour of water. Water doesn’t have a colour. James McBride
• Water in swimming pools changes its look more than in any other form… its colour can be man-made and its dancing rhythms reflect not only the sky but, because of its transparency, the depth of the water as well. If the water surface is almost still and there is a strong sun, then dancing lines with the colours of the spectrum appear everywhere. David Hockney
• It is always interesting to see how artists can cleverly create paintings of water without using blue or green, the obvious colours. Lu Wei Xing
• Water

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The colour of the ocean

• The sea a dark greenish blue like a fig. Eugene Delacroix
• Sit in reverie, and watch the changing colour of the waves that break upon the idle seashore of the mind. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Don’t think of sea as colour. Make it a solid that can support a boat. Think of ‘wetness’ as colour-texture. John Sloan
• Let the blue sky meet the blue sea and all is blue for a time. Moncy Barbour
• Then the sea and heaven rolled as one and from the two came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue. Wallace Stevens
• The artist who pictures sounds as colours, who feels the difference in microns between one sea green and another… is not attending to what the world considers important. Eric Maisel
• Blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not… All colours arouse specific associative ideas… while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract. Yves Klein
• The ocean

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The colour of God

• I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no colour–something which exists before all forms and colours appear… No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centred idea. Shunryu Suzuki
• God is the colour of water. Water doesn’t have a colour. James McBride
• God

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The colour of love

• Colour is something we see with our eyes, but love is something we see with our heart. Joan Walsh Anglund
• In our life, there is a single colour, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the colour of love. Marc Chagall
• I have always painted pictures where human love floods my colours. Marc Chagall
• Love

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The colour of flesh

• If you look closely at any face, you’ll start to see that different areas of the flesh tones are tinged with four other colours – red, green, purple and yellow. Doug Dawson
• It can take an enormous amount of time to come to terms with the idea of using a diversified range of different colours and use them to simply describe what appears to be a flesh pink. Sally Pullen
• Now colour… is the flower of fine modelling. These two qualities always accompany each other, and it is these qualities which give to every masterpiece of the sculptor the radiant appearance of living flesh. Auguste Rodin

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The digital world has further opened up the world of colour

• Some colours are very difficult to render, and you must compensate to get the colour you want on the screen. Claude Chabrol
• It’s funny how the colours of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen. Anthony Burgess
• Creators of computer graphics are ahead of painters… Programs such as Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop have ‘colour pickers’ that present you with a screen full of continuously blended colour from which to choose… Patrick Fanning

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Use of colour – or lack of it – can be an important part of photography

• In my photography, colour and composition are inseparable. I see in colour. William Albert Allard
• Beware of colour theories. Theories in colour photography are dangerous. The plain fact that there are so many of them proves my point. Ernst Haas
• When you photograph people in colour, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls! Ted Grant
• One very important difference between colour and monochromatic photography is this: in black and white you suggest; in colour you state. Much can be implied by suggestion, but statement demands certainty… absolute certainty. Paul Outerbridge

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• He is all palette, and no painting. Peter William Brown
• Fall is my favourite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change colour and fall from the trees. David Letterman
• I don’t know if my husband dreams in color, but he snores in Dolby. Melanie White
• If you choke a smurf, what colour does it turn?
• I’m colour-blind. I can see colours dogs can’t even hear! Murray Tinkelman
• They tend to come out a colour called ‘Pants left in wash’ Eddie Izzard
• Purplish brown? Let’s agree it / is a colour so bad we all flee it / it has no good use / so let’s name it Puce / from the sound we make when we see it. Darby Bannard
• It’s not easy being green. Kermit the Frog, Muppet
• My favourite colour on canvas is nudity.  Jarod Kintz
• eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the colour that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any colour appear white. Ambrose Bierce
• My couch is coffee-coloured. I can thank Starbucks and clumsiness for that.  Jarod Kintz
• Mauve? Mauve is just pink trying to be purple. James Abbott McNeill Whistler
• Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.  G.K. Chesterton

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