color
The climate changed quickly to cold and the trees burst into color, the reds and yellows you can’t believe. It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.
Travels with Charley (New York: Penguin, 1997), p. 23
Pink is the navy blue of India.
D. V. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1997), paperback edition, 106.
On the wide level acres of the valley the topsoil lay deep and fertile. It required only a rich winter of rain to make it break forth in grass and flowers. The spring flowers in a wet year were unbelievable. The whole valley floor, and the foothills too, would be carpeted with lupins and poppies. Once a woman told me that colored flowers would seem more bright if you added a few white flowers to give the colors definition. Every petal of blue lupin is edged with white, so that a field of lupins is more blue than you can imagine. And mixed with these were splashes of California poppies. These too are of a burning color—not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of poppies.
East of Eden (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 5.
Only the Japanese would think of serving red watermelon in a green plate.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 20.
Limitations are really good for you. They are a stimulant. If you were told to make a drawing of a tulip using five lines, or one using a hundred, you’d have to be more inventive with the five. After all, drawing in itself is always a limitation. It’s black and white, or line or not line, charcoal, pencil, pen. You might have a bit of color—but if you can use only three colors, you’ve got to make them look whatever color you want. What did Picasso say? “If you haven’t got any red, use blue.” Make blue look like red.
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 100.
One thing I know about color is that it usually doesn’t work straight out of the paint tube.
Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life, by Todd Oldham (Pasadena, CA: Ammo Books, 2009), 23.
I wear black because I’m comfortable in it. But then in the summertime when it’s hot I’m comfortable in light blue.
Larry King Live, CNN, November 26, 2002.
All things, once seen, they didn’t just die, that couldn’t be. It must be then that somewhere, searching the world, perhaps in the dripping multiboxed honeycombs where light was an amber sap stored by pollen-fired bees, or in the thirty thousand lenses of the noon dragonfly’s gemmed skull you might find all the colors and sights of the world in any one year. Or pour one single drop of this dandelion wine beneath a microscope and perhaps the entire world of July Fourth would firework out in Vesuvius showers.
Dandelion Wine (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978), 160.
I’m still an old-fashioned painter. Maybe in a few years when I’m too old, I’ll need help, but what am I going to do, say to an assistant, put the yellow there?
“True to His Abstraction,” by Carol Vogel, New York Times, January 20, 2012.
If you look at Seurat, most of the dots in the grass are green, the generic color of that area. The other colors only modify that color. I feel less kinship to Seurat than I do to Byzantine mosaics, where an image is built out of discreet incremental marks—chunks of stone or glass—that fit together. I want people to see what made the image. I like dropping crumbs along the trail like Hansel and Gretel. That’s what all these paintings are about.
“Chuck Close,” interviewed by Lisa Yuskavage, BOMB magazine, Issue 52, Summer 1995.
It is getting warmer all the time and I have been swimming almost every morning—except for two marvelous stormy days. Today the sea is like pale blue satin, with a mauve haze—huge freighters and tankers coming in slowly through the haze, like ghosts—lovely.
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 419.
Never was a more brilliant show of colored landscape than yesterday afternoon—incredibly excellent topaz & ruby at 4 o’clock, cold & shabby at 6.
Oct. 11, 1854 entry, Emerson in His Journals, selected and edited by Joel Porte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 457.