Top 246 Quotes & Sayings by David Hockney - Page 3

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

I've always said that the only thing a photograph is good at capturing faithfully is another flat surface.

There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.

I do believe that painting can change the world.

Nature, never, never let's you down, it's not a cliché, nature isn't a cliché, pictures might be, but you can get tired of pictures.

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.

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.

Once you start painting, you could of course get lost. I mean you get out of yourself, you don't know whether you're thinking, you just act actually sometimes.

Drawing takes time. A line has time in it

Water colours are wet colours in water.

I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure...ther e is always, everywhere, an enormous amount of suffering. But I believe my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair...New ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling... I do believe that painting can change the world.

There's a Chinese proverb that says it all: Painting is an old man's art.

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

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.

How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don't.

No one has ever asked to see my degree certificate.

Future art that is based on appearances won't look like the art that's gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same.

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

I've always been a looker. Loads of people say, "I never saw that" - but that's what artists do.

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,'

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.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change.

Everything does come from nature. That's where you get new ideas. Just draw the landscape. I felt doing it with a bit of burnt wood was also good because I was drawing burnt wood with a piece of wood. I wanted to do black and white. After using color, I thought black and white would be good. You can have color in black and white. There is color in them, actually.

Modernism in a way, early modernism, for instance, in pictures, was turning against perspective and Europe. And all early modernism is actually from out of Europe, when you think of cubism is African, is looking at Africa, Matisse is looking at the arabesque, Oceania. Europe was the optical projection that had become photography, that had become film, that became television and it conquered the world.

I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.

It's all right if you don't mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed Cyclops—for a split second.

The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.

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.

Photoshop came out of painting, and now it's going back to painting.

I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.

Faces are the most interesting things we see

I've finally figured out what's wrong with photography. It's a one-eyed man looking through a little 'ole. Now, how much reality can there be in that?

Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such things as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it must be looked at by somebody, and any true and real depiction must be an account of the experience of that looking.

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.

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

I feel 30. [Publo] Picasso said he always felt 30. Well, I do.

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?

There's no need to believe what an artist says. Believe what he does; that's what counts.

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.

The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.

I've always been interested in space in pictures. I think my going deaf increased my spatial sense, because I can't get the direction of sound. I feel that I see space very clearly, and that's because I can't hear it. So it's a compensatory thing.

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!

Just because I’m cheeky, doesn’t mean I’m not serious

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

I think we're in a very exciting time - visually, I think we are. I've not got a crystal ball. I'm not saying I know what the future is at all. In some ways I'm getting quite pessimistic about the future, but in other ways I think it might get better. We are moving into very big changes.

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look

...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.

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.

I am constantly preoccupied with how to remove distance so that we can all come closer together, so that we can all begin to sense we are the same, we are one.

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.

I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money - I think that can be a burden - I’m greedy for an exciting life.

If you like music you like silence actually.

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

It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.

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

The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway - it is called medication.

I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money – I think that can be a burden – I’m greedy for an exciting life. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I get it, actually. On the other hand, I can find excitement, I admit, in raindrops falling on a puddle and a lot of people wouldn’t. I intend to have it exciting until the day I fall over.

Painting and drawing has been here for 35,000 years.

Every good artist I know, I always think works hard, we're working all the time.

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.