David Hockney Quotes

Photography is Art and Art is Photography.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about - it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.

Unlike the older, more humanly shaped arts, which begin with a seed and accumulate their form organically, photography clips its substance out of an actual continuum.

I have a lot of problems with Western European easel painting.

I'm interested in all kinds of pictures, however they are made, with cameras, with paint brushes, with computers, with anything.

I was struggling against the flypaper of other arts harnessing film to their own usages, which means essentially as a recording device or within the long historical trap of picture - by which I mean a collection of nameable shapes within a frame. I don't even think still photography, with few exceptions, has made any significant attempt to free itself from that.

I think that painting is a very ancient form of expression.

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be.

Photography is the first art wherein the tool does most of the work.

Photography has freed the plastic arts from their obsession with likeness.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.

The painters have no copyright on modern art!... I believe in, and make no apologies for, photography: it is the most important graphic medium of our day. It does not have to be, indeed cannot be - compared to painting - it has different means and aims.

Photography was the medium preeminently qualified to unite art with science. Photography was born in the years which ushered in the scientific age, an offspring of both science and art.

But let's speak of art for a moment. Yes, art. I know a gentleman who makes excellent portraits. This gentleman is a camera.

I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun.

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

I wanted to get into art. I did some neon stuff. I worked in, not computer-generated, but computer manipulation of pictures.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

I was always interested in photography and other forms of art.

Coming out of the Louvre for the first time in 1971, dizzy with new love, I stood on Pont Neuf and made a pledge to myself that the art of this newly discovered world in the Old World would be my life companion.