Words matter. These are the best David Hockney Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
You had to be aware that I saw that photography was a mere episode in the history of the optical projection and when the chemicals ended, meaning the picture was fixed by chemicals, we were in a new era.
Anything simple always interests me.
I prefer living in color.
I think my father would have liked to have been an artist, actually. But I think he didn’t quite have perhaps the drive or, I don’t know, I mean he had a family to bring up I suppose.
I paint what I like, when I like and where I like.
I’m interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.
I do do a lot of talking, because it saves me listening.
Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.
I value my friends.
I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, ‘The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.’ A lot of people don’t look very hard.
I live wherever I happen to be.
I’m a very early riser, and I don’t like to miss that beautiful early morning light.
A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.
I worked in the NHS as a hospital orderly during my national service, and people thought it was a noble service. But over the years it’s lost its humanity.
Ultimately, I’m about liberty and I think you have to defend it.
I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.
And then I went round the corner and there’s a Van Gogh portrait, and you just think, well, this is another level. A higher level, actually. I love the Sargent, but it’s not the level of Van Gogh.
What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn’t be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.
I mean if you draw you like drawing, it’s er, an activity you do all the time actually.
I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.
On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb. Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger.
Like people, trees are all individuals.
I see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.
It’s very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.
In fact, most artists want to make things a bit more difficult for themselves as they go along, to challenge themselves.
West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.
I’m a bit claustrophobic, I know that now.
I don’t value prizes of any sort.
There are enough no smoking places now.
Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don’t draw very well can’t do that.
Shadows sometimes people don’t see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.
Spring is very energising to me.
Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.
I go and see anything that’s visually new, any technology that’s about picture-making. The technology won’t make the pictures different, but someone using it will.
Tragedy is a literary concept.
All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.
Who’s going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They’d say, ‘Can I see your paintings?’, wouldn’t they?
In my old age, I’ll be in L.A.
We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
East Yorkshire, to the uninitiated, just looks like a lot of little hills. But it does have these marvelous valleys that were caused by glaciers, not rivers. So it is unusual.
I generally only paint people I know, I’m not a flatterer really.
Cubism was an attack on the perspective that had been known and used for 500 years. It was the first big, big change. It confused people: they said, ‘Things don’t look like that!’
It’s no good saying I wished I could go out more, because I can’t. But I don’t bother about it too much.
But, I would always be thinking of how pictures are constructed and colour, how to use it, I mean you’re using it for constructing, makes you think about it, the place did as well.
I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.
I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that’s it.
Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.
The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.
Always live in the ugliest house on the street – then you don’t have to look at it.
Of course you can still paint landscape – it’s not been worn out.
Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.
When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.
People criticized me for my photography. They said it’s not art.
I’m a bit of a propagandist.
Smoking calms me down. It’s enjoyable. I don’t want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.
Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?
I was 18 when I first visited London, I’m very provincial like that, but I must confess the moment I got to America I thought: This is the place. It was more open, with 24-hour cities and pubs and restaurants that didn’t close.
I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.
I’m fed up with being bossed around.
Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.
People tell me they open my e-mails first, because they aren’t demands and you don’t need to reply. They’re simply for pleasure.
You can’t name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.
I haven’t stopped painting or drawing – I’ve just added another medium.
I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can’t be done in one picture.
Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don’t mind, I’m just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn’t really a mainstream anymore, is there?
