David Hockney Quotes - Page 2

Laugh a lot. It clears the lungs.

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

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

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.

California is always in my mind.

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

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.

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

...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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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,'

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Anything simple always interests me.