Pigment Quotes

• Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

  Boy George

  Long Distance Relationship, Radiance, Separation

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• One makes use of pigments, but one paints with one's feelings.

  Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin

  Feelings, Use, Emotion

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• Colour is as variable and evanescent in the form of pigment as in visible nature.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Color, Variables, Form

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• God may work in light, but we mortals work in pigment.

  Robert Genn

  Light, May, Mortals

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• Each day brings its own colours to be chosen, mixed, pigments of joy, happy moments, smiles and laughter.... And which will you choose? For 'Life' is choice.

  John McLeod

  Laughter, Joy, Choices

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• Luminosity is a quality dependent as much on technique as on the physical properties of individual pigments.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Light, Quality, Technique

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• Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.

  Okakura Kakuzo

  Creativity, Sadness, Artist

  Andrew Forbes, David Henley, Okakura Kakuzo “The Illustrated Book of Tea”

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• The primary pigment of poetry is the IMAGE.

  Ezra Pound

  Art, Poetry, Primaries

  Ezra Pound, Harriet Zinnes (1980). “Ezra Pound and the Visual Arts”, p.152, New Directions Publishing

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• Rhythm is as necessary in a picture as pigment; it is as much a part of painting as of music.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Painting, Rhythm

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• Being black is not a matter of pigmentation - being black is a reflection of a mental attitude.

  Steven Biko

  Attitude, Reflection, Black

  "I Write What I Like: Selected Writings". Book by Steven Biko edited by Aelred Stubbs, www.huffingtonpost.com. 1978.

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• Painting, like water, takes any form. Paint is a film of pigment on a plane. It is not real in the way that gravity-bound sculpture is real. It is, however, real.

  Squeak Carnwath

  Real, Water, Sculpture

  Squeak Carnwath, John Berggruen Gallery (San Francisco, Calif.) (1994). “Squeak Carnwath, recent paintings: September 8-October 8, 1994, John Berggruen Gallery”

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• A painting is nothing more than light reflected from the surface of a pigment-covered canvas. But a great painter can make you see the depth, make you feel the underlying emotion, make you sense the larger world. That, too, is the power of science: to sense and convey the depth and dimensionality of nature, to glance at the surface and to divine the shape of the universe around us.

  Carl Safina

  Light, Curiosity, Depth

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• If ever a painter wrought a miracle of illusion with brush and pigment that painter was Velazquez in his Las Meninas, at the Prado in Madrid.

  Joaquin Sorolla

  Miracle, Madrid, Illusion

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• The best artists know what to leave out. They know how much of the support should show through as the pigment is applied, what details aren't necessary.

  Charles de Lint

  Artist, Support, Details

  "The Ivory and the Horn". Book by Charles de Lint, "Dream Harder, Dream True", p. 293, 1996.

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• What a severe yet master artist old Winter is... No longer the canvas and the pigments, but the marble and the chisel.

  John Burroughs

  Winter, Artist, Canvas

  John Burroughs, Farida Anna Wiley (1997). “John Burroughs' America: Selections from the Writings of the Naturalist”, p.124, Courier Corporation

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• Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

  Eric S. Raymond

  Technology, Experts, Computer

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• My husband is my most ruthless critic... sometimes he will say, 'It's been said better before.' Of course it has. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Husband, Musical, Trying

  FaceBook post by Madeleine L'Engle from May 06, 2016

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• I like a canvas to breathe and be alive. Be alive is the point. And, as the limitations are something called pigment and canvas, let's see if I can do it.

  Lee Krasner

  Alive, Canvas, Breathe

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• There is no climate, no place, and scarcely an hour, in which nature does not exhibit color which no mortal effort can imitate or approach. For all our artificial pigments are, even when seen under the same circumstances, dead and lightless beside her living color; nature exhibits her hues under an intensity of sunlight which trebles their brilliancy.

  John Ruskin

  Nature, Color, Effort

  John Ruskin (1848). “Modern Painters ...: pt. 1-2. Of general principles, and Of truth. 5th ed”, p.154

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• You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

  John Logan

  Art, Philosophy, Drama

  John Logan (2012). “Red”, p.13, Oberon Books

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• It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.

  Terry Pratchett

  Glowing, Purple, Imagination

  "The Colour of Magic". Book by ‎Terry Pratchett, 1983.

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• Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.

  Ted Shawn

  Dance, Art, Men

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• Art lives on the mental plane (the real painting is not the set of dry pigments on the canvas nor is a symphony the sequence of sound waves that convey it to our ear) but, as the post-modernists insist, is reinterpreted in new contexts by each appreciator. As for gossip, which includes the vast majority of our thoughts, its essence is its relation to a unique local part of time and space.

  David Mumford

  Art, Real, Unique

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• I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Art, Angel, Thinking

  Vladimir Nabokov (2016). “Lolita”, p.171, Hamilton Books

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• All the best artists have shown that the greatest achievement in the production of fine color is the concealment of pigments, and not the parade of them; and we may say the same of execution.

  Asher Brown Durand

  Artist, Color, Achievement

  Linda S. Ferber, Asher Brown Durand (2007). “Kindred spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American landscape”, D Giles Ltd

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