Creativity Quote by John Dyer

Dyer is defending excess as craft, not indulgence. The line reads like a studio-side rebuke to anyone who wants to reduce painting to a tidy recipe: give me red, yellow, blue and I will dutifully produce a world that looks like an exercise, not an experience. His insistence on a "wide selection of colours" signals a painter arguing for nuance against a culture (and clientele) tempted by simplification - whether for reasons of cost, pedagogy, or theory.

The subtext is about control. Primary colors are often sold as fundamentals, the honest base from which everything else can be derived. Dyer punctures that moralizing romance with a practical claim: they "only mix a certain range". He frames limitation as technical, but the real point is aesthetic identity. "Work like mine" is doing heavy lifting: style is inseparable from palette, and palette is inseparable from materials. He is asserting that his signature effects - atmosphere, temperature shifts, those near-imperceptible transitions that make light feel lived-in - require pigments that arrive already complicated.

Placed in the early 18th-century art world, the statement also hints at the economics of color. Certain pigments were expensive, proprietary, and status-coded; owning them meant access to particular greens, violets, and earths that primaries can't convincingly imitate. Dyer isn't just talking about mixing. He's staking a claim that realism, mood, and authorship depend on choices that can't be standardized. The quote works because it sounds modestly technical while actually drawing a line: my art can't be mass-produced from a starter kit.