David Hockney Quotes

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

What is drawing? How does one get there? It's working one's way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How can one get through that wall? - since hammering on it doesn't help at all. In my view, one must undermine the wall and grind through it slowly and patiently.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

I see my studio like a laboratory, where I work like an investigator - it's almost forensic. I love the discovery process in painting.

There's no way to really mock up or simulate what I'm doing until I'm there. An exhibition for me is not a statement but an experiment.

For me, drawing is a way of navigating the imagination, and it remains the fundamental vehicle of my practice. Drawing allows me to be at my most inventive.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase. For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.

Drawing is feeling. Color is an act of reason.

The artist does not really create; he discovers.

When I was in art school, I thought art was something I would learn how to do, and then I would just do it. At a certain point I realized that it wasn't going to work like that. Basically, I would have to start over every day and figure out what art was going to be.

If drawing belongs to the world of spirit and color to that of the senses, you must draw first to cultivate the spirit.

My drawings are the result of my sculpture.

Art is partly communication, but only partly. The rest is discovery.

All art is a kind of exploring. To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

When you begin a picture you often make some pretty discoveries. You must be on guard against these. Destroy the thing, do it over several times. In each destroying of a beautiful discovery, the artist does not really suppress it, but rather condenses it, makes it more substantial. What comes out in the end is the result of discarded finds. Otherwise you become your own connoisseur.

It interests me tremendously to make copies... I started it by chance and I find it teaches me things.

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

Making art is a rite of initiation. People change their souls.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Painting is drawing, with the additional means of color.

Matisse makes a drawing, then he makes a copy of it. He copies it five times, ten times, always clarifying the line. He’s convinced that the last, the most stripped down, is the best, the purest, the definitive one; and in fact, most of the time, it was the first. In drawing, nothing is better than the first attempt.

Those who are not conversant in works of art are often surprised at the high value set by connoisseurs on drawings which appear careless, and in every respect unfinished; but they are truly valuable... they give the idea of a whole.