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You would think death was an optional extra nowadays. Nobody wants to tick that box.

David Hockney

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David Hockney
Age: 87
Born: 1937
Born: July 9
Collagist
Draftsperson
Drawer
Graphic Artist
Illustrator
Lithographer
Painter
Photographer
Printmaker
Scenographer
Sculptor
Bradford
Yorkshire
Boxes
Nobody
Wants
Death
Optional
Would
Tick
Think
Nowadays
Thinking
Extra
Extras

More quotes by David Hockney

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But slowly I began to use cameras and then think about what it was that was going on. It took me a long time, I mean I actually played with cameras and photography for about 20 years.
David Hockney
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The picture itself is a document. How do you mean? We're looking at a document. It gives you clues.
David Hockney
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Water colours are wet colours in water.
David Hockney
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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... I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there... to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution.
David Hockney
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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!
David Hockney
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I believe that the very process of looking can make a thing beautiful.
David Hockney
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I've never been interested in, much in the politics of the art world, it doesn't interest me.
David Hockney
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I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can't be done in one picture.
David Hockney
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Perspective is a law of optics... The Chinese did not have a system like it. Indeed, it is said they rejected the idea of the vanishing point in the eleventh century, because it meant the viewer was not there, indeed, had no movement, therefore was not alive.
David Hockney
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On the 31st of October 2011 year, I had a mini-stroke. I couldn't finish my sentences. So I went to the doctor. It was a tiny one. The speech came back in a month or so. I did notice I could draw even better, I felt. I was concentrating more. And I wasn't talking much, but I was drawing. I said, Well, I don't have to talk much.
David Hockney
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No matter what the illusion created, it is a flat canvas and it has to be organized into shapes.
David Hockney
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Picasso is still influencing me. Of course, I haven't got that kind of energy, or skill.
David Hockney
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It's difficult to talk about colour, even remember colour actually.
David Hockney
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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.
David Hockney
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I stay up nights and fiddle with my opera designs. It's a bit obsessive. That's why I can't do it all the time.
David Hockney
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I'm fed up with being bossed around.
David Hockney
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I have never really done any teaching and maybe I should have done. I am not power-mad enough.
David Hockney
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As for the world of fashion and celebrity, I have the usual interest in the human comedy, but the problems of depiction absorb me more.
David Hockney
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Of course you can still paint landscape - it's not been worn out.
David Hockney
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If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize just look... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.
David Hockney