David Hockney Quotes

My work is not about paint. It's about paint at the service of something else. It is not about gooey, chest-beating, macho '50s abstraction that allows paint to sit up on the surface as subject matter about paint.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.

I have never subscribed to the Dirty Pallet school of painting.

Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village.

I like to treat paint as material - to daub it, drop it, let it slide. There was Action Painting, but I also compare it to paint effects found on the streets. This approach is superimposed on a sculptural surface that is also 'painterly.'

I've had a period of drawing on canvas in black - with some of my early images coming thru -, think the non-objectivists will find them disturbing - and the kids who think it simple to splash a 'Pollock' out.

I wanted to be a painter, somewhere between Abstract Expressionism and Pop.

I paint abstract expressions.

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don't find any human content there. I'm from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

In the past 10 years, I've looked at life as this Pollock stuff. And now I'm almost in the post Pollock phase.

He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into nonobjective painting.

Matisse was my God. I'm a French artist, that's for sure. I am color-oriented and what you might call a composer. I am not pouring my guts out; I keep them inside.

When you make a painting, even abstract, there is always a sort of necessary filling-in.

The big shock of my life was Abstract Expressionism - Pollock, de Kooning, those guys. It changed my work. I was an academically trained student, and suddenly you could pour paint, smear it on, broom it on!

I love Nicolas de Stael particularly, and my work can remind people of him. But looked at attentively, our works are not similar at all.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

I happen to like Precisionism. It talks to me because I collect Cubism.

I've heard my work called 'bold' and 'graffiti-like,' but for me it is always instinctual. I start with a shape or a colour and go from there.

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

I think of painting without subject matter as music without words.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

I'm not an abstract artist; I leave that to others. To me, abstract art ended with Kazimir Malevich's 'Black Square.' To continue it is senseless.

I never use nature as a starting point. I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.

I love Monet - I've nicknamed him King Blob. When you go up to the painting, it's a series of blobs - amazing.

The actual technique, the process of painting flat color and simple geometric edges, all dates from my time here on Coenties Slip.