A Quote by Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot

The most important things in a painting are Form and Value. Color comes last - like a friend you welcome. — © Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot
The most important things in a painting are Form and Value. Color comes last - like a friend you welcome.
Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color. Painting without drawing is just 'coloriness,' color excitement. To think of color for color's sake is like thinking of sound for sound's sake. Color is like music. The palette is an instrument that can be orchestrated to build form.
So really what I am trying to do is create and understand form. But then too, color enters into it because a lot of things are color changes without a value change, which wouldn't show up if you were just using a non-color medium.
Painting from life was incredibly important for me because it allowed me to train my eyes to see everything that is there. But I realized early on that painting from life wasn't something that I was all that invested in. I was always more interested in the painting than I was the people. For me, removing that as a compulsion offered me a lot more freedom to actually paint and think about color, form, movement, and light.
Color is a major element in scale. A small room can have a larger look by the use of closely related values, hues, and intensity. A large room can be made to look smaller by marked contrasts of color and value, hue, and intensity. Value is one of the most important elements. Whether light or dark, little value contrast makes for unity, and sharper contrast makes for stronger punctuation.
I feel like what's most important for painting - which has been hierarchically on the top for a really long time in terms of what is considered fine art, by comparison with something like a comic book or what's considered low art - is that painting should open up laterally to include other cultures and things that don't immediately resonate as a painting but are obviously of equal contribution to the genre.
Painting is concerned with the ten things you can see: these are darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, movement and rest.
Modern man has no real "value" for the ocean. All he has is the most crass form of egoist, pragmatic value for it. He treats it as a "thing" in the worst possible sense, to exploit it for the "good" of man. The man who believes things are there only by chance cannot give things a real value. But for the Christian the value of a thing is not in itself autonomously, but because God made it.
It is so hard and long before a student comes to a realization that these [first] few large simple spots in right relations are the most important things in the study of painting. They are the fundamentals of all painting.
I always try to do the most important or urgent tasks first, I avoid waiting till the last minute to finish things, and I value my time. I work smarter by valuing my time and doing the things that can't be done without me while hiring a great team around me to do the rest of the things.
When I adjust materials of different kinds to one another, I have taken a step in advance of mere oil painting, for in addition to playing off color against color, line against line, form against form, etc., I play off material against material, for example, wood against sackcloth.
The older I get, the more I feel that color is what painting is. Painting is primarily color.
You can eliminate color and still have a painting that works, but you must have drawing, value and design.
I think I've always been afraid of painting, really. Right from the beginning. All my paintings are about painting without a painter. Like a kind of mechanical form of painting.
The fact is, that of all God's gifts to the sight of man, color, is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.
For me one of the most important things is not feeling like you have to protect yourself if you're with a real friend.
I'm not interested in 'abstracting' or taking things out or reducing painting to design, form, line, and color. I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it - drama, anger, pain, love, a figure, a horse, my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or idea.
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