David Hockney Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by David Hockney:
It is very good advice to believe only what an artist does, rather than what he says about his work.
~David Hockney
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My only worry is the painting I'm doing. Nothing else.
~David Hockney
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I've always felt very English.
~David Hockney
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I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.
~David Hockney
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Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.
~David Hockney
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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
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Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?
~David Hockney
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Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.
~David Hockney
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As for the world of fashion and celebrity, I have the usual interest in the human comedy, but the problems of depiction absorb me more.
~David Hockney
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To me, the world's rather beautiful if you look at it. Especially nature.
~David Hockney
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Most artists work all the time, they do actually, especially good artists, they work all the time, what else is there to do? I mean you do.
~David Hockney
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Tobacco is America's greatest gift to the world!
~David Hockney
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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
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Spring is very energising to me.
~David Hockney
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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
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Tragedy is a literary concept.
~David Hockney
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I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me.
~David Hockney
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As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.
~David Hockney
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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
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You can't name the inventor of the camera. The 19th-century invention was chemical: the fixative.
~David Hockney
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I think I am seeing more clearly now than ever.
~David Hockney
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Like people, trees are all individuals.
~David Hockney
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When you stop doing something, it doesn't mean you are rejecting the previous work. That's the mistake; it's not rejecting it, it's saying, 'I have exploited it enough now and I wish to take a look at another corner.'
~David Hockney
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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
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I value my friends.
~David Hockney
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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
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I mean if you draw you like drawing, it's er, an activity you do all the time actually.
~David Hockney
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I'm a very early riser, and I don't like to miss that beautiful early morning light.
~David Hockney
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I prefer living in color.
~David Hockney
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I'm a bit of a propagandist.
~David Hockney
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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
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In fact, most artists want to make things a bit more difficult for themselves as they go along, to challenge themselves.
~David Hockney
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Ultimately, I'm about liberty and I think you have to defend it.
~David Hockney
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Anything simple always interests me.
~David Hockney
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There are enough no smoking places now.
~David Hockney
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I actually think the deafness makes you see clearer. If you can't hear, you somehow see.
~David Hockney
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California is always in my mind.
~David Hockney
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I think Picasso was, without doubt, the greatest portraitist of the 20th century, if not any other century.
~David Hockney
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The photograph isn't good enough. It's not real enough.
~David Hockney
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I did come from a pretty independent-minded family.
~David Hockney
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When you are older, you realise that everything else is just nothing compared to painting and drawing.
~David Hockney
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I'm always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.
~David Hockney
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I paint what I like, when I like and where I like.
~David Hockney
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We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.
~David Hockney
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In my old age, I'll be in L.A.
~David Hockney
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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
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People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.
~David Hockney
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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
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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
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I'm a natural sceptic.
~David Hockney
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I think the Enlightenment is leading us into a dark hole, really.
~David Hockney
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All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.
~David Hockney
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I live wherever I happen to be.
~David Hockney
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I've realized that I can do performances.
~David Hockney
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Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.
~David Hockney
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I've always wanted to be able to paint the dawn.
~David Hockney
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I'm fed up with being bossed around.
~David Hockney
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Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?
~David Hockney
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I'm not really looking for theater work. But if somebody approaches me with enthusiasm, I might respond.
~David Hockney
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Photographs aren't accounts of scrutiny. The shutter is open for a fraction of a second.
~David Hockney
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It's no good saying I wished I could go out more, because I can't. But I don't bother about it too much.
~David Hockney
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A lot of people, given the chance, would blow up everything, and you and me.
~David Hockney
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The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.
~David Hockney
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I see the iPad as a wonderful new drawing medium, but I am at a loss as to how to make it pay.
~David Hockney
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Easel painting means small painting.
~David Hockney
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Britain is a very small country with a very large press.
~David Hockney
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I do do a lot of talking, because it saves me listening.
~David Hockney
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I'm very attracted to the great open spaces of the West.
~David Hockney
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Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.
~David Hockney
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I haven't stopped painting or drawing - I've just added another medium.
~David Hockney
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I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.
~David Hockney
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I don't value prizes of any sort.
~David Hockney
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What I didn't know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.
~David Hockney
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I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that's it.
~David Hockney
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You must plan to be spontaneous.
~David Hockney
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Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.
~David Hockney
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The moment rules over everything.
~David Hockney
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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
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Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.
~David Hockney
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Well you can't teach the poetry, but you can teach the craft.
~David Hockney
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I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.
~David Hockney
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I generally only paint people I know, I'm not a flatterer really.
~David Hockney
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But, I would always be thinking of how pictures are constructed and colour, how to use it, I mean you're using it for constructing, makes you think about it, the place did as well.
~David Hockney
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Always live in the ugliest house on the street - then you don't have to look at it.
~David Hockney
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A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
~David Hockney
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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
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I'm a bit claustrophobic, I know that now.
~David Hockney
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Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?
~David Hockney
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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
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All film directors, even the ones using 3-D today, want you to look at what they chose.
~David Hockney
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West Yorkshire is quite dramatic and beautiful, the crags and things.
~David Hockney
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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
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The moment I got a very big studio, everything took off.
~David Hockney
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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
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I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s.
~David Hockney
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It's time to debate images, especially when someone's going to prison for downloading them.
~David Hockney
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Smoking calms me down. It's enjoyable. I don't want politicians deciding what is exciting in my life.
~David Hockney
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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
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I'm not going to stop painting just to take orders.
~David Hockney
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Yes, I did, I mean I painted er, in a kind of abstract expressionist way, because of course that was exciting.
~David Hockney
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It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.
~David Hockney
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People tell me they open my e-mails first, because they aren't demands and you don't need to reply. They're simply for pleasure.
~David Hockney
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Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood.
~David Hockney
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Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.
~David Hockney
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Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.
~David Hockney
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I'm not antisocial. I like people.
~David Hockney
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I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.
~David Hockney
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