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The more I think about colour, the more convinced I become that this reflected half-tint is the principle that must predominate, because it is this that gives the true tone, the tone that constitutes the value, the thing that matters in giving life and character to the object. Light, to which the schools teach us to attach equal importance and which they place on the canvas at the same time as the half-tint and shadow, is really only an accident. Without grasping this principle, one cannot understand true colour, I mean the colour that gives the feeling of thickness and depth and of that essential difference that distinguishes one object from another.
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1854-04-29 (p. 228)

 

Eugene Delacroix

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Colour, if I may say so, is biological. Colour is alive and colour alone makes things come alive.. ..Without losing any part of myself, I need to get back to that instinct, so that these colours in the scattered fields signify an idea to me, just as to them they signify a crop. Confronted by a yellow, they spontaneously feel the harvesting activity required of them, just as I, when faced with the same ripening tint..

 

Paul Cezanne

 

To be white, red, yellow, or black is to be a painter. To-day it is not sufficient for the painter to think of colour; he should be colour, feed on colour and transform himself into painting. That is the essential thing. To feel like colour means to carry within oneself the entire range of colours, not as a treasure, but as a trust.

 

Theo van Doesburg

 

My colour has no symbolic function whatever. I don't want any colour to be noticeable. I want the colour to be the colour of life, so that you would notice it as being irregular if it changed. I don't want it to operate in the modernist sense as colour, something independent. I don't want people to say, "Oh, what was that red or that blue picture of yours, I've forgotten what it was."

 

Lucian Freud

 

[W]e may fancy that we see or feel what we in reality infer. Newton saw the truth of many propositions of geometry without reading the demonstrations, but not, we may be sure, without their flashing through his mind. A truth, or supposed truth, which is really the result of a very rapid inference, may seem to be apprehended intuitively. It has long been agreed by thinkers of the most opposite schools, that this mistake is actually made in so familiar an instance as that of the eyesight. There is nothing of which we appear to ourselves to be more directly conscious, than the distance of an object from us. Yet it has long been ascertained, that what is perceived by the eye, is at most nothing more than a variously coloured surface; that when we fancy we see distance, all we really see is certain variations of apparent size, and degrees of faintness of colour; and that our estimate of the object's distance from us is the result of a comparison (made with so much rapidity that we are unconscious of making it) between the size and colour of the object as they appear at the time, and the size and colour of the same or of similar objects as they appeared when close at hand, or when their degree of remoteness was known by other evidence. The perception of distance by the eye, which seems so like intuition, is thus, in reality, an inference grounded on experience; an inference, too, which we learn to make; and which we make with more and more correctness as our experience increases; though in familiar cases it takes place, so rapidly as to appear exactly on a par with those perceptions of sight which are really intuitive, our perceptions of colour.

 

John Stuart Mill

 

The age we live in is largely – and I think mostly – ‘objective’, but a minority is reacting against this .. ..My feeling is that I made colour –m the colour plane – ‘objective’ in 1918, 1920 and 1921. There is a feeling of objectivity in all the great Primitives- but in ‘the subject’ there is no solution for the object, which has so much intrinsic value that it is ‘’highly explosive’: it destroys all the things around it, unless they have been designed specifically to serve as a setting for it. (a letter to Simone Herman, 1933)

 

Fernand Leger