Gary Hume Quotes

I do think you get lonelier and lonelier being an artist as you get older.

I don't vote. I voted Labour once, in that moment of euphoria. I know that if people only made a voice for change, then change will happen, but I'm not that person. I'm painting pictures.

If I'm feeling desperate, I'll go out image-hunting. I'll go to news agents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start to realise that I am drawn to particular things, and then I start wondering why that is.

The surface is all you get of me.

The disenfranchised should be going to art school - not the franchised.

Now, I love painting. I love looking. I love the fact that they don't move. They constantly change with the light. They are sort of patient.

I think Picasso is more feminine than Matisse.

I got a job as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years, but I found writing incredibly difficult, and I thought, 'How am I going to make a film if I can't write?' I didn't really comprehend that someone else would do that bit.

I'm probably creative for half an hour a day. The rest of the time, I'm just doing what's necessary to make that creativity visible.

The Doors are perfect paintings; a relief from the picture world I've created for myself.

I found that gloss paint suited me entirely, and its qualities still intrigue me. It's viscous and fluid and feels like a pool. It's highly reflective, which means there are layers of looking. You look at the picture, and you look at the surface, then you look at the reflection in the surface behind you, then you look at yourself.

Small paintings can be fantastic. But you can't often get a narrative out of a small painting. In any case, museums are huge places, and you want to take up some space.

Sometimes I can see the whole painting from the outset in my mind's eye. But more often than not, that idea doesn't last the duration of the painting. Sometimes it comes out easy, just as I had envisaged. But that is reasonably rare.

I like things that are just about to go. Everything's leaving. Death is never far away from me. When you make something, death can't help but be in it.

Over the years, my 'Door' paintings have become somewhat mythologized.

I lived on nothing for years - squatted where I lived and where I worked, stole electricity, made things from stuff I found in skips, used paper that had been discarded - you do everything you can do to keep going and not have to get a job.

People constantly describe me as a formalist or even a minimalist, but I'm not really bothered with the rules of painting or the history of painting. My approach is that everything is mine. I take what I can use from wherever, and then I forget where I've taken it from. But there is no point me making anything that looks like anyone else's.

I'd like to give people leaden boots in galleries, so they'd be a bit slower in front of my paintings. And that's because I spend so much time looking at them. I can look at them a long, long time without getting bored. I disappear.

I love to see a wood full of bluebells. Growing up in the Kent countryside, I have special memories of this brief annual spectacle.