Art Quotes

“I paint what I like, when I like, and where I like.”

“The picture isn't finished until you've taken the hand of the viewer and led them through it.”

“Before he did all those lovely line drawings, Matisse would make really detailed charcoal drawings and tear them up. He wouldn't leave them about, he thought of them as working drawings. I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there. And then when you come to use line, if you know what you're looking at, it's much easier to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution to what you want to depict.”

“What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw.”

“I've started painting much more freely, and faster. I think it's working in the theatre that did it. You know what the Glyndebourne scene-painters said about my The Magic Flute? They said they had to wear sunglasses to paint it.”

“In one gallery they actually had a notice which said "No Sketching." How obnoxious! I said, "How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?"”

“Television is becoming a collage — there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.”

“If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.”

“We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way.”

“In the end nobody knows how it's done — how art is made. It can't be explained. Optical devices are just tools. Understanding a tool doesn't explain the magic of creation. Nothing can.”

“I usually only draw myself in down periods. I do, actually. I suppose that's why I often draw myself looking grim. I just think, "Let's have a look in the mirror." When you are alone and you look in a mirror you never put on a pleasing smile. Well, you don't, do you?”

“It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them.”

“Interviewer: Love is certainly at the center of tolerance. They're intertwined, in a certain way. It helps you appreciate difference. Hockney: Yes. And that's probably why I do portraits. Everybody's different; they look different, and are different. Maybe deep, deep down we're all the same. But on the surface we seem to be different, don't we?”

“With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!”

“I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is.”

“I'm aware it's now a hostile city [New York City]. I feel I'm in school, actually. There are signs everywhere you don't get in any other city. When you see all the smokers outside a building in New York, I just think the building is full of bad-mannered people who haven't thought, "We'll give them a little room to smoke in." That's what a reasonable person, a person with good manners, would do.”

“There's no doubt you smoke to calm yourself. I know I do. That's my decision about how I keep calm. I prefer that to Prozac. In fact I think it's healthier. I couldn't go to another New York party where they're all drinking water and on Prozac and telling you off for smoking.”

“How can [[Tony Blair|[Tony] Blair]] fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique.”

“It takes a long time to become young in painting.”

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

“Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.”

“Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things.”

“It is all very well to copy what one sees; it is much better to draw what one has only seen in one's memory.”

“Drawing is the artist's most direct and spontaneous expression. A species of writing: it reveals, better than does painting, his true personality.”

“If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.”

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

“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.”

“If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint, and the picture would be unnecessary.”

“The first merit of a painting is to be a feast for the eye.”

“Colour is the fruit of light.”