David Hockney Quotes

I wish I could draw.

I never draw except with brush and paint.

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

I'm an artist and I can draw very well. I'm amazed that everybody can't draw well because I can do it so effortlessly.

Hands are the tool of the painter, the artist.

As to the 'St. Michael,' the subject is very fine, but very difficult, so I doubt that I shall find easily amongst my pupils one capable of carrying it out satisfactorily even after my own drawing. In any case, it will be necessary for me to touch it up carefully with my own hand.

I wanted to learn how to paint rather than just doing black-and-white work.

When I was nine, my great grandfather, a landscape painter, taught me to mix colors. With his strong hand surrounding my small one, he guided the brush until a calla lily appeared as if by magic on a page of textured watercolor paper.

When I started out, I wanted to paint the Sistine Chapel. But I didn't have the content.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

Almost any fool can paint an academy picture, and any imbecile can shoot off a Kodak.

The brush is a more powerful and rapid tool than the point or the stump... the main thing that the brush secures is the instant grasp of the grand construction of a figure.

One paints with one's head, not one's hand.

In a sense I'm glad that I've never learned how to paint.

Every artist would like to live in the central organ of creation... Not all are destined to get there... but our beating hearts drive us deep down, right into the pit of creation.

How many books did Renoir write on how to paint?

The technician should never forget that he is an artist, the artist never that he is a technician

If I don't have anything better to do that day, I'll copy paintings, generally by people who have some relationship to the work of the moment.

I'm a painter first, and a musician second.

You might curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore.

Students work in schools making life studies for years, win prizes for life studies and find in the end that they know practically nothing of the human figure. They have acquired the ability to copy.

There are a lot of young artists that are dope.

The problem of making the inner meet the outer of today is, of course, the function of the artist.

Painters who are not colorists produce illumination, not painting.

He best can paint them who shall feel them most.