David Hockney Quotes - Page 4

In fact, most artists want to make things a bit more difficult for themselves as they go along, to challenge themselves.

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Photography sees surfaces, it doesn't see space. We see space but the camera doesn't.

I'm convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries.

I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure. I think there is a contradiction in an art of total despair, because the very fact that the art is made seems to contradict despair.

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.'

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?

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

I have never really done any teaching and maybe I should have done. I am not power-mad enough.

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.

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