110+ David Hockney Quotes On Colour, Art And His Work

David Hockney is an English artist born in 1937. He is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century and is known for his vibrant and distinctive style. He is best known for his paintings of the English countryside, his portraits, and his use of photography and multi-media collages. Following is our collection on famous quotes by David Hockney on colour, art, his work.

Top 10 David Hockney Quotes

1. The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.
2. Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.
3. 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.
4. The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.
5. I think photography has made us see the landscape in a very dull way - that's one of its effects. It's not spatial.
6. 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.
7. The thing with high-tech is that you always end up using scissors.
8. Just because I’m cheeky, doesn’t mean I’m not serious
9. If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
10. 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.

David Hockney Short Quotes

• Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want.
• There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the perspective of a paralysed Cyclops.
• I've always been a looker. Loads of people say, "I never saw that" - but that's what artists do.
• The only people who need degrees are dentists and brain surgeons.
• It's all one to me: opera, painting, drawing, faxes.
• I'm coming 'round to the view that there's only a personal view of the world.
• Anything simple always interests me.
• The lens is a tyranny.
• No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized into shapes.
• Painting and drawing has been here for 35,000 years.

David Hockney Quotes About Art

...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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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

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

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

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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

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

David Hockney Quotes About His Art

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

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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

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

David Hockney Quotes About Move

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. — David Hockney

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

Time is the great mystery anyway. And it's still the great mystery in the moving picture as well. — David Hockney

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

The pictures on the walls aren't like movies. They don't move, they don't talk, and they'll last longer. They will last longer. — David Hockney

The editing of moving pictures is geared toward the single image. You'd have to edit things in new ways. — David Hockney

We all know a mirror reflects us, if you look in it. If you move, the reflection moves. If you project from a mirror, meaning it will project an image, it's nothing to do with you. The world seen by nobody. — David Hockney

David Hockney Quotes About Making

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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

I'm really only interested in technology that is about pictures. I'm interested in anything that makes a picture. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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

I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is. — David Hockney

It takes a long time to make it simple. — David Hockney

David Hockney Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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

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

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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,' — David Hockney

OH, I LIKE smoking, I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life. I don't suppose anyone smoking a pipe would have road rage, would they? — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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? — David Hockney

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! — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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

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. — David Hockney

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

There would be no bohemia without smoking. — David Hockney

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

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. — David Hockney

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

I never work with music. I hate background music, always did. I only like music in the foreground, meaning, deliberately listen to it, actually. — David Hockney

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

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

On the 31st of October 2011 year, I had a mini-stroke. I couldn't finish my sentences. So I went to the doctor. It was a tiny one. The speech came back in a month or so. I did notice I could draw even better, I felt. I was concentrating more. And I wasn't talking much, but I was drawing. I said, "Well, I don't have to talk much." — David Hockney

The vanishing point leads to the missiles of today, which can take us out of this world. It could be that the west's greatest mistakes were the 'invention' of the external vanishing point and the internal combustion engine. — David Hockney

There's no-one up there in Northern Norway, food's terrible, but it's very, very beautiful to look at, if you've got eyes, and enjoy looking. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

Style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want. The idea of the rigid style seemed to me then something you needn't concern yourself with, it would trap you. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

Faces are the most interesting things we see — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

Technology brought in the mass media and technology is now taking it away. — David Hockney

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

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. — David Hockney

Paint something every day. — David Hockney

I do believe that painting can change the world. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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? — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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

I thought using three cameras was a lot better than one, because you could see where you were going, where you'd been, and all kinds of things - more like life. I think photography has colored our vision. We're now in an area where it might break something. I think this is a time. I feel it. I don't know whether I'll be here long enough to experience it. I've no plans to leave yet. — David Hockney

Well, in Bradford I could say I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood. — David Hockney

If you are not playful you are not alive. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

You can't believe any picture nowadays, if it's digital. You can't really believe. If you see me shaking hands with Mr. [Barack] Obama, it doesn't mean I ever met him, does it? — David Hockney

In one gallery they actually had a notice which said No Sketching. How obnoxious! I said, How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching? — David Hockney

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

It's a myth that if you're liked by only four people it must be good. It might also be very bad: they might be your mother, your brother, your uncle and your aunt. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

Great claims are being made for the photograph as truth. We are showing you things, we show you the war. I say you can't actually. The camera can't. — David Hockney

In fact, I'm a bit of a slob, but I've always said my excuse, I have a higher sense of order, I can see it where others can't. That's my excuse for slobbery, I must admit, but I think it's a good one. — David Hockney

I think we seem to remember things in still pictures. I never gave up on painting. When they said painting was dead, I just thought, Well, that's all about photography, and photography's not that interesting, and it's changing anyway. — David Hockney

Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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. — David Hockney

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

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. — David Hockney

The cameras are getting smaller, they're getting more versatile, and eventually, I'm sure you'll have a camera with lots and lots of things on it so you can alter the picture. You could alter perspective. — David Hockney

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

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

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. — David Hockney

Because I'm interested in depiction, representation, therefore you're interested in photography. You don't ignore it. — David Hockney

If you like music you like silence actually. — David Hockney

I believe that the problem of how you depict something is a formal problem. It's an interesting one and it's a permanent one; there's no solution to it. There are a thousand and one ways you can go about it. There's no set rule. — David Hockney

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

How can Blair fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique. — David Hockney

I did come from a pretty independent-minded family. — David Hockney

Life Lessons by David Hockney

1. David Hockney's life and art demonstrate the importance of staying true to oneself and embracing one's individual style.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of experimentation and taking risks to push the boundaries of art.
3. Finally, his career is a testament to the power of hard work and dedication to one's craft.