David Hockney Art Quotations

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.

Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that.

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

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.

Until cubism, all art, all pictures, could be 'read' by anybody. If this hadn't been so, the Christian message wouldn't have been seen by peasants and its importance would have been diminished.

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?

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

I love California; everything is so artificial.

We need all kinds of artists. We have no need to destroy drawing. We lose so much. This wouldn't happen in music.

Once my hand has drawn something my eye has observed, I know it by heart, and I can draw it again without a model.

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

...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.

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

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.

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?

I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.

People criticized me for my photography. They said it's not art.

I'm sure that the camera is part of European art.

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 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.

It is difficult to say why I decided I wanted to be an artist. Obviously, I had some facility, more than other people, but sometimes facility comes because one is more interested in looking at things, examining them, more interested in the visual world than other people are.

I've never been interested in, much in the politics of the art world, it doesn't interest me.

No theoretician, no writer on art, however interesting he or she might be, could be as interesting as Picasso. A good writer on art may give you an insight to Picasso, but, after all, Picasso was there first.

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

The moment you can learn to deal with homosexuality in art, it's quite an exciting moment, just as in a sense when people 'come out' it's quite an exciting moment. It means they become aware of their desires, and can deal with them in a remarkably honest way.

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

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

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

What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw.

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

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

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.

the great strength is that the art worked outside of galleries and museums. It did not need them. (They need it.)

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.