David Hockney Quotes

I always start a painting with the sky.

I paint abstract expressions.

My painting does not come from the easel.

Remember that a painting - before it is a battle horse, a nude model, or some anecdote - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.

You cannot possibly invent painting all by yourself.

I paint with shapes.

Painting is seen as picture making, the making of an art object, something that can stand on its own.

Painting is the art of hollowing a surface.

I just walk around, observing the subject from various angles until the picture elements arrange themselves into a composition that pleases my eye.

This isn't a watercolor, it's a mural.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

In a painting, you can't make out whether the artist painted the left eye before the right eye. In Chinese calligraphy, you can see the progression of the artist's stroke.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

The mind of the painter must resemble a mirror, which always takes the colour of the object it reflects and is completely occupied by the images of as many objects as are in front of it.

Painting does what we cannot do - it brings a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional plane.

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.

My work is always very geometric.

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured.

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

I try and take the photographs and paintings and make them real. And the real video we treat as paintings. We flip the reality.

My work isn't about form. It's about seeing.

In painting, you don't have to go through a process of opinion; it speaks directly, and either it works, or it doesn't.

I love the way painting is so full of illusionistic possibilities.

A lot of cinematography is intuition. It's an art, not a formula.

I paint paintings of people.