Hockney Quotes

Anything simple always interests me. ~ David Hockney

All painting, no matter what you are painting, is abstract in that it's got to be organized. ~ David Hockney

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

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

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

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

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

I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium. ~ David Hockney

When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing. ~ David Hockney

I'm not really looking for theater work. But if somebody approaches me with enthusiasm, I might respond. ~ David Hockney

No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized into shapes ... ~ David Hockney

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

I'm a bit claustrophobic, I know that now. ~ David Hockney

The history of photography needs clearing out. It needs something else now. Because photography always acknowledged there were cameras before photography. ~ David Hockney

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

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

Ultimately, I'm about liberty and I think you have to defend it. ~ David Hockney

Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life. ~ David Hockney

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it? ~ David Hockney

The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough. ~ David Hockney

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

I've always wanted to be able to paint the dawn. ~ David Hockney

Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill. ~ David Hockney

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

Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft. ~ David Hockney

What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space. ~ David Hockney

An artist might be attracted to hedonism, but of course an artist is not a hedonist. He's a worker, always. ~ David Hockney

I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s. ~ David Hockney

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

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

The problem is, photographic dyes and printing inks aren't as good as paint, actually. ~ David Hockney

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet. ~ David Hockney

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

I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really. ~ David Hockney

In my old age, I'll be in L.A. ~ David Hockney

The lens is a tyranny. ~ David Hockney

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it. ~ David Hockney

What the art historians had forgotten is that in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, and Indian art, they never painted shadows. Why did they paint shadows in European art? Shadows are because of optics. Optics need shadows and strong light. Strong light makes the deepest shadows. It took me a few years to realize fully that the art historians didn't grasp that. There are a lot of interesting new things, ideas, pictures. ~ David Hockney

When you're very young, you suddenly find this marvellous freedom. It's quite exciting, and you're prepared to do anything. ~ David Hockney

The video camera dominates art. It's a bore, it makes everything look a bit the same. If you look at things with a pencil and paper in your hand, you are going to see far more. ~ David Hockney

California is always in my mind. ~ David Hockney

I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful. ~ David Hockney

Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away. ~ David Hockney

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

I think the ambiguity of similarity and difference is very powerful. It's the same scene in different times of year read across the grid, and, of course, different locations reading vertically. But you can get confused and lost in the series. You force the mind, which is always comparing and contrasting, to stumble ... That ambiguity is very powerful. One is getting lost and refinding oneself. ~ David Hockney

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

Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill. ~ David Hockney

On the 31st of October 2011 year, I had a mini-stroke. I couldn't finish my sentences. So I went to the doctor. It was a tiny one. The speech came back in a month or so. I did notice I could draw even better, I felt. I was concentrating more. And I wasn't talking much, but I was drawing. I said, "Well, I don't have to talk much." ~ David Hockney

In one gallery they actually had a notice which said No Sketching. How obnoxious! I said, How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching? ~ David Hockney

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

If you are not playful you are not alive. ~ David Hockney

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

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus. ~ David Hockney

We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way. ~ David Hockney

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

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs. ~ David Hockney

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

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway. ~ David Hockney

After I'd drawn the grasses, I started seeing them. Whereas if you'd just photographed them, you wouldn't be looking as intently as you do when you are drawing, so it wouldn't affect you that much. ~ Martin Gayford

Water in swimming pools changes its look more than in any other form its colour can be man-made and its dancing rhythms reflect not only the sky but, because of its transparency, the depth of the water as well. If the water surface is almost still and there is a strong sun, then dancing lines with the colours of the spectrum appear everywhere. ~ David Hockney

The high-definition picture is still a perspective picture. That's the real problem, the perspective picture. ~ David Hockney

Just because I'm cheeky, doesn't mean I'm not serious ~ David Hockney

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely! ~ David Hockney

I value my friends. ~ David Hockney

Until I saw my drawings replayed on the iPad, I'd never seen myself draw. Someone watching me would be concentrating on the exact moment, but I'd always be thinking a little bit ahead. That's especially so in a drawing where you are limiting yourself, a line drawing for example. When you are doing them you are very tense, because you have to reduce everything to such simple terms. ~ David Hockney

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory - where it stays - it's transmitted by your hands. ~ Martin Gayford

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

My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else. ~ David Hockney

Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it. ~ David Hockney

You must plan to be spontaneous. ~ David Hockney

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

The editing of moving pictures is geared toward the single image. You'd have to edit things in new ways. ~ David Hockney

I do do a lot of talking, because it saves me listening. ~ David Hockney

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

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist. ~ David Hockney

Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out. ~ David Hockney

In the end nobody knows how it's done - how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can. ~ David Hockney

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. ~ David Hockney

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. ~ David Hockney

I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world. ~ David Hockney

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

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

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

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light. ~ David Hockney

Loads of people, particularly artists, hate pretty pictures. Now I've never met anyone who didn't like a pretty face. ~ David Hockney

OH, I LIKE smoking, I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life. I don't suppose anyone smoking a pipe would have road rage, would they? ~ David Hockney

Time is the great mystery anyway. And it's still the great mystery in the moving picture as well. ~ David Hockney

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

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!' ~ David Hockney

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

Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at. ~ Martin Gayford

It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes. ~ David Hockney

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. ~ David Hockney

I'm a bit of a propagandist. ~ David Hockney

I live wherever I happen to be. ~ David Hockney

I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me. ~ David Hockney

It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work. ~ David Hockney

If you like music you like silence actually. ~ David Hockney

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

I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really. ~ David Hockney