David Hockney Quotes

In the same way, I can wake up with a very positive idea of what I want to do for my collection, and be completely desperate at night regarding the same thing. And I do a lot of other things too: Writing for me is almost as important as drawing my collection.

O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art.

The big artist keeps an eye on nature and steals her tools.

I look out the window sometimes to seek the color of the shadows and the different greens in the trees, but when I get ready to paint I just close my eyes and imagine a scene.

I sometimes begin a drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil on paper... but as my eye takes in what is so produced, a point arrives where some idea crystallizes, and then a control and ordering begins to take place.

The 'Women' had to do with the female painted through all ages, all those idols, and maybe I was stuck to a certain extent; I couldn't go on. It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light - all this silly talk about line, colour and form - because that was the thing I wanted to get hold of.

When I'm doing a drawing, I get lots of ideas I use them in my songs, even. I do a lot of drawings because that's where I get most of my spending cash and I just always have to have new records, to get something to satisfy my listening pleasure.

For me, the sketchbooks are more like a secret and wholly spontaneous jeu d'esprit and some of them I like as much as anything I have ever done. They are invariably without premeditation. I mean not only that I have no plan when I make them, I also have no plan to make them.

The most beautiful colors laid on at random, give less pleasure than a black-and-white drawing.

My inspiration came from the land, ... and, of course, from Paul Klee . . . and the poetics of his paintings.

You ask me where I get my ideas. That I cannot tell you with certainty. They come unsummoned, directly, indirectly - I could seize them with my hands - out in the open air, in the woods, while walking, in the silence of the nights, at dawn, excited by moods which are translated by the poet into words, by me into tones that sound and roar and storm about me till I have set them down in notes.

I do a lot of research, I try to think about how it relates to music and I just do a ton of drawing. It's much easier to work your ideas out that way.

I was meticulously copying other art and then I realized I could just use a camera and put my time into an idea instead.

Creative work is incredibly difficult, and that is where the tests lie. Ordinary professionalism and twenty years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places. That still needs what it always needs - a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.

My drawings have been described as pre-internationalist, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them had occurred to me. I shall not argue the point.

I'm just working with ideas in my head and with drawings that the artists did. And suddenly to see these things come to life in movies - it's just wonderful.

It is the bareness of drawing that I like. The act of drawing is what locates, suggests, discovers. At times it seems enough to draw, without the distractions of color and mass. Yet it is an old ambition to make drawing and painting one.

People get inspired to write, paint, draw, sing, sculpt, dance in many different ways. And there are many types of art. But the one thing that they all have in common is that they are all a sort of magic. Sometimes the magic flows from one’s fingers, other times it is transferred to the person who experiences the result. Magic has always worked in mysterious ways.

Great art can only be created out of love.

The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration.

I don't really know where I got my artists idea. The scraps of what I remember do not explain to me where it came from. I only know that by this time it was definitely settled in my mind.

My discussion with Keith Richards about the creative process led me to believe that there's an invisible presence of a stream of ever-flowing creativity that we overhear-all you have to do is pull up the antenna and dial it in. This presence allows you to maintain your sense of origin and move forward.

"Where do you get your ideas?" That's the one question I'm genuinely sick of being asked, and also genuinely fascinated by. What fascinates me is not that people ask the question, but what kind of answer are they really looking for? Because if I tell them the truth, which is "I make them up," they seem very disappointed. They want to know about the trek I do once a year to the mountain.

For people who live in the imagination, there is no lack of subjects. To seek for the exact moment at which inspiration comes is false. Imagination floods us with suggestions all the time, from all directions.

Don't think about making art, just get it done.