Top 100 Hockney Quotes
#1. My dream is to own a Hockney - I'm a Yorkshireman, and his vibrant colours are a good example of how the north-country people are vibrant and colourful.
Brian Blessed
#2. I'm not one of those artists having people there lying around on their paintings, you know, like Hockney or whoever.
Peter Doig
#3. He agreed with David Hockney that an artist really had to be able to draw before anything else could be achieved.
Alexander McCall Smith
#4. I'm a huge fan of David Hockney. I love the way he keeps reinventing himself.
Antony Sher
#5. In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn't know anyone unknown who didn't become famous.
Michael Caine
#6. 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
#8. I'm convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries.
David Hockney
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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.
David Hockney
#13. I'm always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.
David Hockney
#14. If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look ... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.
David Hockney
#15. 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
#16. Britain is a very small country with a very large press.
David Hockney
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always.
David Hockney
#20. Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away.
David Hockney
#21. It's difficult to talk about colour, even remember colour actually.
David Hockney
#22. 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
#23. What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw.
David Hockney
#24. The moment you can learn to deal with homosexuality in art, it's quite an exciting moment, just as in a sense when people 'come out' it's quite an exciting moment. It means they become aware of their desires, and can deal with them in a remarkably honest way.
David Hockney
#26. I've always been a looker. Loads of people say, "I never saw that" - but that's what artists do.
David Hockney
#28. 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
#29. 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
#31. 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
#32. The cameras are getting smaller, they're getting more versatile, and eventually, I'm sure you'll have a camera with lots and lots of things on it so you can alter the picture. You could alter perspective.
David Hockney
#33. 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
#34. Every good artist I know, I always think works hard, we're working all the time.
David Hockney
#36. The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.
David Hockney
#37. Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?
David Hockney
#38. There is only one exit from the dream: gnosis (enlightenment). When you finally grasp that your existence has been one long dream, both public and private (waking and sleeping, across many different bodies and lifetimes), you transcend the dream. You
Mike Hockney
#39. I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s.
David Hockney
#40. Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model.
David Hockney
#41. 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
#42. I never work with music. I hate background music, always did. I only like music in the foreground, meaning, deliberately listen to it, actually.
David Hockney
#43. We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.
David Hockney
#44. I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.
David Hockney
#45. Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it.
David Hockney
#46. It's a myth that if you're liked by only four people it must be good. It might also be very bad: they might be your mother, your brother, your uncle and your aunt.
David Hockney
#47. 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
#48. Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.
David Hockney
#49. I think I am seeing more clearly now than ever.
David Hockney
#50. I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.
David Hockney
#51. When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.
David Hockney
#53. It's time to debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for downloading them.
David Hockney
#54. 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
#56. But the moment you use an ordinary camera, you are not seeing the picture, remember, meaning, you had to remember what you've taken. Now you could see it of course, with a digital thing, but remember in 1982 you couldn't.
David Hockney
#57. 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
#58. Eight years ago, I wouldn't have painted this subject I'm starting now: a clearing filled with grasses. It would have seemed too much of a jumble. I had to keep looking and drawing, and looking. Now, because of all that time I spent drawing these grasses, I know what I'm looking for.
Martin Gayford
#61. I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.
David Hockney
#62. I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium.
David Hockney
#63. Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that.
David Hockney
#64. I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.
David Hockney
#65. As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.
David Hockney
#66. Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don't keep office hours.
Martin Gayford
#67. Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!
David Hockney
#68. I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can't hear, you somehow see.
David Hockney
#69. Painting and drawing has been here for 35,000 years.
David Hockney
#71. You would think death was an optional extra nowadays. Nobody wants to tick that box.
David Hockney
#72. Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.
David Hockney
#73. Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood.
David Hockney
#74. Time is the great mystery anyway. And it's still the great mystery in the moving picture as well.
David Hockney
#75. I love California; everything is so artificial.
David Hockney
#76. I have never really done any teaching and maybe I should have done. I am not power-mad enough.
David Hockney
#77. The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.
David Hockney
#78. All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.
David Hockney
#79. I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.
David Hockney
#80. But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.
David Hockney
#81. There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art.
David Hockney
#82. There's no need to believe what an artist says. Believe what he does; that's what counts.
David Hockney
#83. If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.
David Hockney
#84. Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don't draw very well can't do that.
David Hockney
#85. A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.
David Hockney
#86. I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time.
David Hockney
#87. 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
#88. Only after seeing the winter, do you comprehend the richness of summer. This was a big theme, and one I could confidently do: the infinite variety of nature.
Martin Gayford
#90. Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
David Hockney
#91. Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.
David Hockney
#92. 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
#93. I never talk when I'm drawing a person, especially if I'm making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more.
David Hockney
#94. No one has ever asked to see my degree certificate.
David Hockney
#95. 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
#96. Great claims are being made for the photograph as truth. We are showing you things, we show you the war. I say you can't actually. The camera can't.
David Hockney
#97. The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That's the real problem, the perspective picture.
David Hockney
#98. It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.
David Hockney
#99. West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.
David Hockney
#100. Ultimately, I'm about liberty and I think you have to defend it.
David Hockney
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