Howard Hodgkin Quotes

Everything I do, whether it's producing or signing an artist, always starts with the songs. When I'm listening, I'm looking for a balance that you could see in anything. Whether it's a great painting or a building or a sunset.

Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.

What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Beauty: the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.

My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic.

I like to think that my works flow like music. That may be one reason I work in large groups versus one picture of one thing; it's the flow of the whole series that counts.

To give a body and a perfect form to one's thought, this - and only this - is to be an artist.

Beauty is produced by the pleasing appearance and good taste of the whole, and by the dimensions of all the parts being duly proportioned to each other.

The point is to balance on the edge between musicality and content.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

Design, whether it's on your body or in your home, is the same thing. It's mixing different colors, different textures, and unexpected patterns - elements that you wouldn't often put together in an interesting way.

I get the same charge from juxtaposition of colors as I do from juxtaposition of chords.

It's all in how you arrange the thing... the careful balance of the design is the motion.

The aim of art is to understand and establish order, which is another form of beauty.

I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Don't confuse symmetry with balance.

I don't know what good composition is.... Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There's a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.

And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

By appreciating the darkness when you design the light, you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives.