David hockney quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

You must plan to be spontaneous.

I do believe that painting can change the world.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning.

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

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

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.

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look

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.

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

Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.

Enjoyment of the landscape is a thrill.

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

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

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.

No one has ever asked to see my degree certificate.

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.

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.

I'm a very early riser, and I don't like to miss that beautiful early morning light.

As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it.

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.

If you like music you like silence actually.

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

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

I think cubism has not fully been developed. It is treated like a style, pigeonholed and that's it.

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.

All painters are interested in photography to a certain extent.

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

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

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 am seeing more clearly now than ever.

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.

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

California is always in my mind.

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.

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?

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

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.

Drawing takes time. A line has time in it

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.

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.

Movie actors disappear - any young person wouldn't know Cary Grant. They're going to disappear. Fifty years ago, you thought film was here to stay. But nothing is here to stay, actually - except perhaps paintings and drawings.

Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.

I never talk when I'm drawing a person, especially if I'm making line drawings. I prefer there to be no noise at all so I can concentrate more.

I've no doubt that those photographs i took will make people look at everything in a more interesting way - the little tear on one piece of paper, the shadow on another. But good painting has always done that - made you see things. And the most ordinary can be the most extraordinary.

Being able to draw means being able to put things in believable space. People who don't draw very well can't do that.

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

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

Who's going to ask a painter to see a diploma? They'd say, 'Can I see your paintings?', wouldn't they?

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.

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

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

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.

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,'

If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.

If you are not playful you are not alive.

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.

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.

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.

In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Anything simple always interests me.

...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 was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.

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

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

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

I'm always excited by the unlikely, never by ordinary things.

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.

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

Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer and clearer still, until your eyes ache.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's very British to go about to see something unusual and paint it.

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

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

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.

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.'

I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.

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.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

I'm fed up with being bossed around.

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.

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

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

I did come from a pretty independent-minded family.

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

I think probably something big can be done with cameras, I'm not saying, er, I'm saying chemical photography's finished, that means you can't have a Cartier Bresson again, you need never believe pictures.

The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I was always interested in photography because it makes a picture.

It takes a long time to make it simple.

We don't all see the same way at all. Even if I'm sitting looking at you, there is always the memory of you as well. And a memory is now. So someone who's never met you before is seeing a different person. That's bound to be the case. We all see something different. I assume most people don't look very hard at anything.

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

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.

Faces are the most interesting things we see