David Hockney Quotes

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.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Photography doesn't teach you to express your emotions; it teaches you how to see.

Why talk about sculpture when I can photograph it?

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Is photography an art? There is no point in trying to find out if it is an art. Art is old-fashioned. We need something else.

I've always thought photography was an art form, but it had very low appreciation in the beginning, except for some Europeans, and of course Stieglitz. Stieglitz always considered photography to be an art form and is the "father" of the creative concepts of the twentieth century.

Photography is art when it's used by an artist.

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.

Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

And I think a painting has such a limited life anyway.

In the eighteenth century, it was ladies and gentlemen and swings in a garden; today, it may be Campbell's soup cans or highway signs. There is no real difference. The artist still takes his everyday world and tries to make something out of it.

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Photography, painting or poetry - those are just extensions of me, how I perceive things; they are my way of communicating.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

I'm impressed by the way some illustrators develop their images on computers, but it's too late for me to start, and I'm still in love with paper and paint and pencils.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.