Top 100 David Hockney Quotes
#1. Movie actors disappear - any young person wouldn't know Cary Grant. They're going to disappear. Fifty years ago, you thought film was here to stay. But nothing is here to stay, actually - except perhaps paintings and drawings.
David Hockney
#2. I'm convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries.
David Hockney
#3. I'm rather shocked by what I thought was simple mindedness actually. I thought they're not looking, they're not actually looking.
David Hockney
#4. About shadows: do we see shadows? Loads of people don't. A camera will notice a shadow, but how many people have got a shadow in front of them when they take a picture and don't notice it, and then they see it in the photograph because the photograph will catch the shadow.
David Hockney
#5. All along I've had an ambivalent relationship to photography - but as to whether I thought it an art form, or a craft, or a technique, well, I've always been taken with Henry Geldzahler's answer to that question when he said, I thought it was a hobby.
David Hockney
#6. The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it, as long as you really believe 100 percent.
David Hockney
#7. 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.
David Hockney
#8. An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.
David Hockney
#9. Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.
David Hockney
#10. Perspective is a law of optics ... The Chinese did not have a system like it. Indeed, it is said they rejected the idea of the vanishing point in the eleventh century, because it meant the viewer was not there, indeed, had no movement, therefore was not alive.
David Hockney
#11. I usually only draw myself in down periods ... I suppose that's why I often draw myself looking grim. I just think, 'Let's have a look in the mirror.' When you are alone and you look in a mirror you never put on a pleasing smile. Well, you don't, do you?
David Hockney
#12. 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.
David Hockney
#14. You always need a bit of low-tech.You always need a pair of scissors, it seems to me. You can do better things ... The high-tech, somehow, you do have to combine it with low-tech things.
David Hockney
#15. In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.
David Hockney
#16. The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.
David Hockney
#17. Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?
David Hockney
#18. Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about ... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there ... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution ...
David Hockney
#19. We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.
David Hockney
#20. I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.
David Hockney
#21. Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.
David Hockney
#22. I think I am seeing more clearly now than ever.
David Hockney
#23. When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.
David Hockney
#25. The 'how' has a great effect on what we see. To say that 'what we see' is more important than 'how we see it' is to think that 'how' has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that 'how' often affects 'what' we see.
David Hockney
#26. 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.
David Hockney
#27. I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.
David Hockney
#28. Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!
David Hockney
#29. Time is the great mystery anyway. And it's still the great mystery in the moving picture as well.
David Hockney
#30. I love California; everything is so artificial.
David Hockney
#31. I have never really done any teaching and maybe I should have done. I am not power-mad enough.
David Hockney
#32. All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.
David Hockney
#33. I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.
David Hockney
#34. There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art.
David Hockney
#35. 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.
David Hockney
#36. Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
David Hockney
#37. Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.
David Hockney
#38. No one has ever asked to see my degree certificate.
David Hockney
#39. We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music.
David Hockney
#40. It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.
David Hockney
#41. West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.
David Hockney
#43. All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?
David Hockney
#44. The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.
David Hockney
#45. On the iPhone I tended to draw with my thumb. Whereas the moment I got to the iPad, I found myself using every finger.
David Hockney
#47. I was never that interested in movies. I was interested in them as a thing, but I didn't want to make movies. I always wanted to draw and paint.
David Hockney
#48. I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me.
David Hockney
#49. I feel 30.[Publo] Picasso said he always felt 30. Well, I do.
David Hockney
#51. I thought the iPhone was great, but this takes it to a new level - simply because it's eight times the size of the iPhone, as big as a reasonably-sized sketchbook ... Anyone who likes drawing and mark-making will like to explore new media.
David Hockney
#52. In fact, most artists want to make things a bit more difficult for themselves as they go along, to challenge themselves.
David Hockney
#53. I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.
David Hockney
#56. 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.
David Hockney
#57. It is difficult to say why I decided I wanted to be an artist. Obviously, I had some facility, more than other people, but sometimes facility comes because one is more interested in looking at things, examining them, more interested in the visual world than other people are.
David Hockney
#58. Dawn is about luminosity and so is the iPhone ... The little drawings of the dawn are done while I'm still in bed ... If you're in my kind of business you'd be a fool to sleep through that ... Artists can't work office hours, can they?
David Hockney
#59. I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West.
David Hockney
#60. Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.
David Hockney
#61. Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?
David Hockney
#62. We all know a mirror reflects us, if you look in it. If you move, the reflection moves. If you project from a mirror, meaning it will project an image, it's nothing to do with you. The world seen by nobody.
David Hockney
#64. The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography.
David Hockney
#65. The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be.
David Hockney
#66. Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.
David Hockney
#67. Television is becoming a collage - there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.
David Hockney
#68. When you stop doing something, it doesn't mean you are rejecting the previous work. That's the mistake; it's not rejecting it, it's saying, 'I have exploited it enough now and I wish to take a look at another corner.'
David Hockney
#69. The pictures on the walls aren't like movies. They don't move, they don't talk, and they'll last longer. They will last longer.
David Hockney
#70. In fact, I'm a bit of a slob, but I've always said my excuse, I have a higher sense of order, I can see it where others can't. That's my excuse for slobbery, I must admit, but I think it's a good one.
David Hockney
#71. No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting he or she might be, could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first.
David Hockney
#72. Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.
David Hockney
#73. Just because I'm cheeky, doesn't mean I'm not serious
David Hockney
#75. How can Blair fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique.
David Hockney
#76. As for the world of fashion and celebrity, I have the usual interest in the human comedy, but the problems of depiction absorb me more.
David Hockney
#77. Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look
David Hockney
#78. I do believe that painting can change the world.
David Hockney
#79. I have got an iPad, what a joy! Van Gogh would have loved it, and he could have written his letters on it as well.
David Hockney
#80. 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.
David Hockney
#81. You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.
David Hockney
#82. 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.
David Hockney
#83. The picture itself is a document. How do you mean? We're looking at a document. It gives you clues.
David Hockney
#84. There's no-one up there in Northern Norway , food's terrible, but it's very, very beautiful to look at, if you've got eyes, and enjoy looking.
David Hockney
#85. The problem is, photographic dyes and printing inks aren't as good as paint, actually.
David Hockney
#86. I can often tell when drawings are done from photographs, because you can tell what they miss out, what the camera misses out: usually weight and volume - there's a flatness to them.
David Hockney
#87. It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.
David Hockney
#89. Loads of people, particularly artists, hate pretty pictures. Now I've never met anyone who didn't like a pretty face.
David Hockney
#90. All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.
David Hockney
#91. I'm a bit claustrophobic, I don't like crowds, I live by the sea - that's what I see when I come out of my house in Bridlington.
David Hockney
#92. I mean if you draw you like drawing, it's er, an activity you do all the time actually.
David Hockney
#93. I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.
David Hockney
#94. It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes.
David Hockney
#95. There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.
David Hockney
#96. What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.
David Hockney
#97. The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.
David Hockney
#98. People from the village come up and tease me: 'We hear you've started drawing on your telephone.' And I tell them, 'Well, no, actually, it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad,'
David Hockney
#99. I can see that cinema seems to be finished. Everybody has a bigger screen at home. I'm assuming eventually you won't need a screen at all - these iPhones will just project.
David Hockney
#100. With watercolour, you can't cover up the marks. There's the story of the construction of the picture, and then the picture might tell another story as well.
David Hockney
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