David Hockney Quotes

I like all those painters who loved and had a strong feeling for nature.

One day, in the San Francisco walk, he came upon some badly painted figures and observed that good painters imitate nature but bad ones vomit it forth.

Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.

Beauty has became a pejorative word in art. It was not something one should aspire to, because it was pedestrian. Beautiful things became cheap and easy. If it's cheap and easy, then upper classes aren't going to aspire to it. So, they have to find something more esoteric. I wanted the paintings to be realistic enough that you would have the ability to forget that I'm showing them to you.

Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in.

I believe it is one's duty to paint the rich and magnificent aspects of nature. We need gaiety and happiness, hope and love.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

Painting predicates what man wants to see, and what man ought to see, not what he ordinarily sees.

What is painting but the act of embracing, by means of art, the surface of the pool?

I sometimes set myself thinking and imagining that I find amongst men but one single art or science, and that is drawing or painting, all others being members proceeding therefrom.

Every painting is always two paintings: The one you see, and the one you remember.

Actual space is intrinsically more powerful and specific than paint on a flat surface.

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

A heightened sense of the observation of nature is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.

Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

A lot of ideas don't translate very well into art. To say, "Oh my god, the grass is green ..." You're going to end up with a big green painting.

Neither is there figurative and non-figurative art. All things appear to us in the shape of forms. Even in metaphysics ideas are expressed by forms. Well then, think how absurd it would be to think of painting without the imagery of forms. A figure, an object, a circle, are forms; they affect us more or less intensely.

Perspective is the rein and rudder of painting.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.

Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

You know, it's just like being a peddler. You want two breasts? Well, here you are -- two breasts. We must see to it that the man looking at the picture has at hand everything he needs to paint a nude. If you really give him everything he needs -- and the best -- he'll put everything where it belongs, with his own eyes. Each person will make for himself the kind of nude he wants, with the nude that I will have made for him.