How Do Artists Interpret Quotes On Colours In Art?

I get weirdly sentimental about colour quotes — they stick with me like a song hook. One of my favorites is from 'The Color Purple': Shug Avery says, 'I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it.' That line lands so hard because it turns colour into ethics — noticing beauty becomes a moral act. I still think about it when I'm cycling past a surprising patch of wildflowers or when my apartment suddenly looks better after I buy a cheap vase in the exact right blue. Another line that lives in my head is from 'The Great Gatsby': 'Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.' Nick Carraway's meditation turns a simple colour into yearning and unreachable hope. And I always come back to Morpheus in 'The Matrix' — 'You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland...' — because red and blue become a literal choice, a colour-coded fork in your life. Lastly, there's Ishmael in 'Moby-Dick' and that eerie reflection on whiteness — the way 'whiteness' becomes ominous rather than pure. What I love is how different writers and creators let colour carry mood, politics, or philosophy. Sometimes it's playful (red pill/blue pill), sometimes it's tender (purple as sacred), and sometimes it's uncanny (whiteness as terror). Those lines don't just describe hues; they change how I notice them in real life.

I get excited about questions like this because colours are like tiny emotional stories, and some books collect those little stories into lines you can carry around. If you want a single volume that reads like a parade of colour-related lines and histories, start with 'The Secret Lives of Colour' — it's stuffed with short essays and memorable turns of phrase about individual hues and their cultural meanings. Victoria Finlay's 'Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox' (also published as 'Color: A Natural History of the Palette') is another treasure: it blends history, travel anecdotes, and a handful of beautifully pointed observations that feel quote-ready. For more academic or art-centered quotes, try 'Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color' and 'Chromophobia' — they include plenty of cited lines from artists, theorists, and historical texts that are arresting when pulled out of context. If you prefer curated collections of pithy lines, the classic quotation dictionaries like 'Bartlett's Familiar Quotations', 'The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations', or 'The Penguin Dictionary of Quotations' are surprisingly useful: search them for keywords like "blue", "red", "green" and you'll get a parade of memorable takes from poets, painters, and philosophers. I also love mixing in modern designers' and brands' treatments — books such as 'Pantone: The 20th Century in Color' pair images with captions that can feel like quotes, and 'The Little Book of Colour' offers psychological snippets you can bookmark. A tiny habit that helps: keep a physical notebook and jot the line plus the page; over months you end up with a personalized mini-anthology that feels way more meaningful than a random list on the web.

I still get a little thrill when a poet nails a color so perfectly you can see it for a second like a flash photo. For me, some of the most lyrical color lines come from older Romantics and Symbolists who treated color as emotion: William Blake’s 'The Tyger' literally burns with a color — “burning bright” — and that heat becomes the poem’s pulse. John Keats sprays pastoral gold all over 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' with its ‘‘golden daffodils’', and those simple hues make nature feel tactile and gentle. Arthur Rimbaud takes color further in 'Voyelles', assigning whole personalities to vowels by painting them black, white, red, green and blue — it’s almost synesthetic and always surprises me. If you like darker or more urban palettes, Charles Baudelaire’s 'Les Fleurs du mal' drenches decadence in strange, gorgeous tones, while Rainer Maria Rilke and Pablo Neruda (in translation) use color as a way to name longing and tenderness rather than just describe scenery. Sylvia Plath and Derek Walcott are masters at sudden, precise chromatic images — a flash of red or a Caribbean turquoise that flips the mood. Contemporary poets like Ocean Vuong and Mary Oliver keep that lyrical tradition alive: Oliver’s greens and browns settle you into a path; Vuong’s chromatic metaphors can feel like a fresh bruise or a new sunrise. If you want to chase these moments, look for anthologies or curated selections of 'Selected Poems' from any of these writers, and try reading a single poem out loud while picturing the color as a scene. I often reread a line on slow mornings with a mug of tea — it changes how the color arrives for me.

I get genuinely giddy whenever colours come up in conversation—there’s something about how a single hue can carry mood, history, and a whole personality. If we’re talking about artists who created the most inspiring lines about colour, a few names keep popping up for me. Wassily Kandinsky’s line, 'Color is a power which directly influences the soul,' always stops me in my tracks; it’s one of those statements that makes you want to rearrange your palette and your day. Pablo Picasso also had that perfect practical poetry: 'Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.' It’s short, human, and true—color moves with feeling. Then there’s Goethe, whose 'Colors are the deeds and sufferings of light' gives colour a theatrical life; I used to quote that when teaching a late-night sketch class, because it makes light feel active. Paul Klee fascinates me too: 'Colour has taken possession of me; no longer do I have to chase for it, I know that it has hold of me forever.' That line feels like falling in love—sudden and total. Josef Albers, more methodical, wrote in 'Interaction of Color' that 'In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is— as a single, flat and unchanging entity,' which is endlessly useful when trying to explain why context matters in design and painting. Vincent van Gogh’s observation—'I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day'—is a personal favorite because it flips expectations and makes me look at shadows. Claude Monet’s reputed 'Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment' captures the bittersweet of chasing the perfect light. Frida Kahlo’s blunt tenderness—'I paint flowers so they will not die'—turns colour into preservation. Together these quotes give different angles: spiritual, emotional, scientific, obsessive, and tender. I usually keep a few of them written on the inside cover of my sketchbook so on gray days I can pick one and try to make it true on the page.

There’s a small design habit I notice all the time in brand style guides and it always makes me smile: designers will put colour names in quotes like "'Ocean Blue'" or "'Eco Green'". For me it’s a shorthand that does a bunch of jobs at once. First, the quotes turn an ordinary word into a branded concept — it becomes less about the literal wavelength and more about the story you want people to feel when they see that shade. Saying 'Sunset Orange' in quotes invites the reader to imagine the mood, not just the hex code. Beyond mood, I use quotes when I’m writing for teammates because they signal that the name is a label, not a universal truth. Two people might call different things "blue," so wrapping the name in quotes highlights that this is our internal name for that specific colour. It makes it easier when I'm emailing a developer or a copywriter: they know the name is part of the brand vocabulary, and they should check the swatch rather than guess. Sometimes clients also use quotes intentionally to signal irony or to distance themselves — for example, putting 'natural' or 'sustainable' in quotes can be a little wink that the claim needs backing. If you’re building a brand guide, here’s a tiny practical tip from my messy notebook: always pair the quoted colour name with a real spec — hex, RGB, Pantone — and a sample. The quotes give voice and personality, the specs give precision. That combo keeps the brand human and repeatable, which is exactly what I love about good design — it’s equal parts feeling and detail.

I've been obsessed with colour projects for years, and yes — photographers absolutely can build entire series around quotes on colours, and it’s one of my favorite creative traps to fall into. I usually start with one sentence that hooks me — something like 'Blue is the silence between words' — and then sketch a tiny moodboard: textures, street scenes, fabrics, and the exact shade of blue I want (there’s something almost nerdy-great about picking Pantone-like swatches at 11pm with a mug of tea). That quote becomes the spine: every frame either echoes its emotion, contradicts it, or fills in the unsaid parts. Technically, I mix approaches. Some images are literal — a cobalt door, a denim jacket, a rainy tram window — and some are abstract — bokehs, gels, motion-blurs that feel like a colour being lived. I play with lighting (golden-hour vs tungsten for warmth/cool play), white balance to push hues, and selective desaturation to emphasize the quoted colour. Captions are part of the art: place the quote in a consistent typeface, or break it across a set of images to force viewers to read slowly. For a physical show, I’d sequence prints so the quote unspools across frames; for Instagram, I’d make a 3x3 grid where each tile is a word or mood of the sentence. The best part? Collaborating with writers, painters, or typographers turns the project into a tiny community performance — people end up sending me colour-captured moments that unexpectedly fit a line. If you’re starting, pick one hue, pick one short line, and let the world surprise you while you chase that tone.

Whenever a scene feels flat for me, I reach for a color quote like a tiny flashlight. It snaps everything into focus: an external image becomes an emotional anchor. I like using other writers’ color lines as epigraphs at the start of chapters — a short, resonant sentence that sets the hue of what follows. For example, dropping a line about 'blue' can prime readers for melancholy or distance, while a feverish 'scarlet' can signal danger or desire. In my notebook I keep clipped lines from poems and novels; they’re my palette references when I’m stuck. Beyond epigraphs, I love sprinkling quoted color phrases into dialogue and interior monologue. A character who calls a dress “the wrong kind of green” reveals taste, class, or memory, without an exposition dump. Use quotes to contrast: a narrator might borrow an old family phrase — "the sky was ‘ash-colored’ like Grandpa’s coat" — and that one quoted metaphor carries backstory. And don’t be shy about mixing senses: quoted descriptions that treat color like a smell or sound — "it tasted like violet jam" — create synesthetic imagery that lingers. Practically, aim for specificity (not just 'red' but 'rust-red, like attic metal') and rotate your quoted motifs so color becomes a recurring, evolving language through the piece. Try this, and you’ll see color do heavy lifting for mood and memory.

My brain lights up whenever someone asks about vintage quotes on colours — it's like treasure-hunting through old books and yellowed magazines for little language gems. If you want the authentic, original phrasing, start with digitised libraries: Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive are goldmines for public-domain texts where you can search inside books for words like 'crimson', 'cerulean', 'sable', or even older terms like 'tincture' and 'sanguine'. Google Books is great too because you can filter by publication date and pinpoint Victorian or Edwardian usages. For more curated quote-style finds, I often poke around Wikiquote and 'Bartlett's Familiar Quotations' for famous lines that mention colour. Museums and libraries — the British Library, the Library of Congress, The Met, and the Victoria & Albert Museum — have digital collections and object descriptions that sometimes contain wonderfully old-fashioned colour phrasing in catalog notes and exhibition texts. Don’t forget periodicals: Chronicling America and old newspaper archives can surface ad copy and poetry with a delightful vintage turn of phrase. If you like visuals alongside quotes, sites like Pinterest and Tumblr host scanned ephemera: postcard captions, trade cards, and magazine snippets. Use specific-era searches (e.g., 1890–1930) and play with synonyms and archaic colour names. A final tip from my own late-night searches: use OCR-friendly PDFs so you can Ctrl+F through entire scans — it saves hours and leads to those unexpectedly poetic lines that feel like they were written just for you.