Top 35 Howard Hodgkin Quotes

#1. I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.

Howard Hodgkin

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#2. A lot of people ... are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid.

Howard Hodgkin

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#3. It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.

Howard Hodgkin

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#4. I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?'

Howard Hodgkin

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#5. I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, 'What do you want, a shopping list?' They kept asking, 'What's in this picture?'

Howard Hodgkin

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#6. I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

Howard Hodgkin

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#7. Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten.

Howard Hodgkin

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#8. I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

Howard Hodgkin

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#9. In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

Howard Hodgkin

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#10. A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.

Howard Hodgkin

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#11. It is simply impossible to control a large painting with the edge in the same way that you can control a small one.

Howard Hodgkin

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#12. I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

Howard Hodgkin

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#13. Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.

Howard Hodgkin

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#14. I hate painting.

Howard Hodgkin

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#15. I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.

Howard Hodgkin

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#16. To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.

Howard Hodgkin

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#17. My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.

Howard Hodgkin

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#18. Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.

Howard Hodgkin

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#19. In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.

Howard Hodgkin

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#20. My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

Howard Hodgkin

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#21. The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.

Howard Hodgkin

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#22. I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me.

Howard Hodgkin

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#23. When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

Howard Hodgkin

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#24. I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

Howard Hodgkin

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#25. I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

Howard Hodgkin

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#26. I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

Howard Hodgkin

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#27. The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.

Howard Hodgkin

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#28. I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

Howard Hodgkin

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#29. I don't think you can lightly paint a picture. It's an activity I take very seriously.

Howard Hodgkin

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#30. Eventually, a collection ceases to be a personal indulgence and assumes its own identity. In fact, it becomes a thing in its own right - rather like Frankenstein's monster.

Howard Hodgkin

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#31. A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

Howard Hodgkin

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#32. I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

Howard Hodgkin

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#33. You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.

Howard Hodgkin

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#34. My pictures really finish themselves.

Howard Hodgkin

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#35. I never think that anything I do is courageous.

Howard Hodgkin

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