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Art & Creativity Quote by Pablo Picasso

"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun"

About this Quote

Picasso’s line is a neat little dagger aimed at the complacent idea that art is just skilled copying. On the surface, he’s talking about painting the sun. Underneath, he’s laying out two opposing philosophies: representation versus transformation. One kind of painter looks at the most mythic, emotionally loaded object in the sky and reduces it to a “yellow spot” - a technical shorthand, a competent symbol that deadens the experience. The other starts with something laughably minimal, a mere daub of pigment, and somehow makes you feel heat, glare, distance, awe. Same ingredients, opposite alchemy.

The subtext is pure Picasso: the job isn’t to reproduce what the eye already knows; it’s to remake perception. That’s why the phrase pivots on the identical “yellow spot.” He’s insisting the raw material is trivial. What matters is the artist’s power to charge a mark with meaning, to turn abstraction into sensation. It’s also a defense of modernism’s apparent simplicity. Cubism and its descendants were often mocked as childish or unfinished. Picasso answers: the issue isn’t whether it looks like the sun; it’s whether it behaves like the sun in your mind.

Context matters. Picasso comes out of rigorous academic training and then helps blow that tradition open. This quote reads like a manifesto from someone who mastered realism and walked away, not because he couldn’t render the world, but because he wanted painting to compete with reality on a different battlefield: attention, emotion, and revelation.

Quote Details

TopicArt
SourceAttributed to Pablo Picasso; commonly cited. French phrasing often given as: "Il y a des peintres qui transforment le soleil en une tache jaune, et il y en a d'autres qui, grâce à leur art, transforment une tache jaune en soleil." See Wikiquote entry.
Cite

Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Picasso, Pablo. (2026, January 15). Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/some-painters-transform-the-sun-into-a-yellow-9481/

Chicago Style
Picasso, Pablo. "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/some-painters-transform-the-sun-into-a-yellow-9481/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/some-painters-transform-the-sun-into-a-yellow-9481/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.

More Quotes by Pablo Add to List
Picasso on Perception and Creative Transformation
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About the Author

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso (October 25, 1881 - April 8, 1973) was a Artist from Spain.

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