David Hockney Quotes

The way that light hits objects, I think, is one of the more important things that sculpture and photography share.

The way that light hits objects in life, three-dimensional objects before you photograph them, is really the story of photography.

A day without sunshine is like, you know, night.

The dark is light enough.

The substance of painting is light.

Stained glass is unique from the outside, but as a painting insider, I know that oil painting's all about light. And it's about the depiction of light, the way that it bounces off different types of skin, different landscapes. The mastery of that light is the obsession of most of my painter friends.

I always think of shade as being full of light. That is why I like to use the word shade rather than light and shadow. Shade seems to play over the thing, envelop it, better define it, while shadow seems to fall on the thing and stain the surface with darks.

A luminous body will appear more brilliant in proportion as it is surrounded by deeper shadow.

I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.

An increase in light gives an increase in darkness.

To light a candle is to cast a shadow.

What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.

In anything there has to be dark and light. There's a lot of joy in my paintings and a lot of darkness.

You can't have a light without a dark to stick it in.

I don't personally see my work as being dark. What interests me is a balance between light and dark.

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

It is still color, it is not yet light.

My quest, through the magic of light and shadow, is to isolate, to simplify, and to give emphasis to form with the greatest clarity.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

Shadow owes its birth to light.

When we sit down to draw or paint the sun's rays, we generally use yellow because in the morning and the evening with the blue light scattered away so strongly you're left with a little bit of red and it comes out yellowish.

Darkness is absence of light. Shadow is diminution of light.