DAVID HOCKNEY (1937-2026) - QUOTES
David Hockney was introduced to me in 2025, by Kuan, my first watercolour instructor.
During a Zoom session on colour theory, Kuan showed us a photograph of Hockney to illustrate his masterful use of complementary colours - not only in his paintings, but also in the way he dressed.
I became more acquainted with Hockney and his artistic wisdom only when news of the passing of this artistic giant reached me this June.
As I read and watched more about his life and work, many of his thinking and ideas captivated me. I may not understand all of what he said yet, so I took notes, hoping to return to them at some point in the future.
Note: To my best recollection, I have coded his own words in blue. The rest of the notes (in brown) are what I read/hear of people talking about Hockney.-----------------
David Hockney's career spanned 70 years, He passed away on 11 June 2026, aged 88.
The breadth of his career is hard to overstate: from abstraction to realism to photography to theatre design to immersive 3D visuals, from tiny depictions to enormous scale.
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About looking
Hockney spent his whole life insisting cheerfully that wonder was best assessed by just looking.
Everybody does look, it is just a question of how hard I look. I can get excitement and pleasure watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Most people think it is just raining.
Most people do not look as much as they scan the ground in front of them so that they can walk, but they don’t really look at things.
If you took van Gogh and put him into a dreary kind of motel room, I suspect that at the end of the week he will still come up with interesting paintings - the hole in the carpet he'd paint. Somehow everything becomes interesting because he is looking at it.
About drawing
I would say just draw. And if you draw you will develop a style because handwriting is a style, if you can handwrite you can draw, and it will be another view of the world from another person.
Everyone has a unique way to depict a unique experience.
The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.
Painting 24 hours a day
I say that I can paint 24 hours a day, I do in the sense that I take the painting I am working on into my bedroom, I put it on the wall. I look at them last thing in the night and first thing in the morning. So I know instantly what to do and I bring them back into my studio to work on it. It’s like living in the studio, better.
Being a painter
What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.
I think of myself as a worker
I think of myself as a worker, that’s all I do. Artists are workers, by definition they work.
I will do it until I drop dead. I don't just retire.
Most artist are going to get forgotten. I might be forgotten but most artists will be. because if we remember all artists, we will be up to our neck in rubbish, wouldn’t we?
About photography replacing painting
Around 1865 or 1870, photography was very new. At that time, people probably thought that what is seen through the camera lens was the truth.
Actually, everything on a flat surface is an abstraction. But we need depictions.
The camera cannot see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.
And when they say painting was dead, I just thought it can’t be, because that would be just leaving everything to photography to depict things and it’s not good enough at all.
(Dictionary reference: Abstraction is the process of reducing complexity by hiding unnecessary details and emphasizing the important features.)
In photography, we are not really looking. When we are painting, we look at one blade of grass, and then we see the other blades of grass, and we are always seeing more.
Looking at a painting vs looking at a photograph
When we look at a painting, we are looking at how another human is looking. We are not looking at how a machine captures something.
In a painting, someone had spent hours in front of the world and skillfully handed this to us in a single image.
He pointed out that if you look at a photograph of a scene, you are already looking at that scene for longer than the camera did, But he would point out that when you look at, say, a Rembrandt, you are looking at so much time he had spent with that scene, and if it is a portrait, with that other person.
Hockney said he had enjoyed painting portraits because he is looking and looking, and most people have not experienced someone looking at them for say 20 hours. It is a 20 hour exposure actually.
His insights into the way the Chinese and Japanese paint
In China or in Japan, they never use shadows. They never use perspective and they even never use reflections.
There are many art historians who do not know that the Chinese never use shadows. They have never noticed that because they are not missed either.
When you get a Japanese print of a bridge, you do not see reflections. Japanese paintings traditionally showed no shadows or reflections.
And the great Chinese scroll paintings have no fixed points at all - you move through the scene as the scroll unfolds as if you are moving through the world incorporating time into a still image.
The bayeux tapestry made circa the year 1100 is 93m long and covers four years, and that has no vanishing points and no shadows.
About perspectives
Shadows and perspective, vanishing points are essential to photography. It is all from the lens.
I know everything on a flat is an abstraction. And perspective is the abstraction made with the lens on the flat surface. That’s all perspective is.
Hockey used his depiction of a chair to illustrate his insights into perspective.
He explained his depiction of this chair, - if you see the perspective, you think the painting should go a certain way. The reason it goes this way (ie, how he had painted it) is I am walking past the chair, I see it this side (the left), then the front, and then that side (the right). If you do it that way (the way you think the perspective should be), then i fact, you have stood still. I began to discover that perspective is a fascinating subject.
(Saccades are the rapid, jerky movements your eyes make as they jump from one point to another. Rather than moving smoothly across a scene, your eyes make a series of quick jumps—called saccades—interspersed with brief pauses, known as fixations.)
Hockney also actually thought that perspective was quite limited.
He pointed out that painters bent perspectives. Leonardo bent perspective. He said that in a way, nature doesn’t really have perspective - trees do not follow the rules of perspective - they are complicated - the branches going everywhere, and perspective is of no use for them.
About inspiration
Inspiration, she never visits the lazy
He says there is a difference between trying to access a scene and trying to access how human relate to a scene, and when you really think about it, the latter is much more relevant
It is not the landscape that is boring. It is the depictions of it that have become boring.
We have endless subjects i nature. Endless.
His use of the iPad to paint
Hockey saw the iPad as a thing you could take out to the world. During the lockdown in 2020, at 82, he experimented with iPad drawings. He did 116 iPad drawings of spring that year, and he sent them out into the world with a lockdown message of Hope for everybody. His iPad drawings went on to dominate the halls of the royal Academy.
He would take advantage of the iPad - if we want to paint a sunset or a sunrise, these are fleeting moments. The skill we need is speed because a sunset moves way faster than we think. And how quickly we can work with the palette is that there is a bottleneck between our eye and the fleeting moment in front of us.
He would have the iPad in front of him, and he could select any colour instantly, there’s no drying time, he doesn’t have to worry about mixing pigments, he could just use the paints instantly and that allowed him to try to capture the image of spring in a way that no other technology before had allowed.
About his embracing change and technology
Hockney would lock horns with every single machine, testing them to exhaustion in just how well they can depict the human experience.
In the 1980s, he made art on an office photocopier, He sent paintings as fax art down telephone lines. He played with broadcast computer graphic machines. He messed around with Polaroid, and then the phone. And then his iPad drawings.
Even at the end of his life, when he was 85 years old he put AI art experiments of his on the pyramid stage at Glastonbury.
Every single time a new picture making machine appeared, while his critics were drafting their incredibly dismissive letters to the newspapers decades after the decades, Hockney was deep into his experimenting.
Sadly for us, his AI experiment was one he couldn’t finish.
It is a real loss to the world to have an artist who would have plough through AI to understand its potential, regardless of what anyone else thought, like he has so many times before. At this point where people are so polarised in their opinions on this latest technology, we have lost one of the greatest explorers to guide us.
Hockney challenged a different way to see every single decade.
Technology and art
I am convinced that technology and art go together - and always have, for centuries.
Hockney spent his whole life on the difference between what machines record and what humans see. And he understood that distinction deeply.
Today, with screens constantly in front of our faces, we do not have to work to look. it is just given to us. We have become increasingly passive. Hockney's true Legacy is in telling us that infinite more beauty exists - even in the most seemingly mundane things in the real world - if we train ourselves to see it.
Being thrilled even at his age
When you realise that you have something really good to do and at my age you get very very excited. It makes me feel a lot younger fitter. And I realise that it is a stimulant. You are living. Life is exciting interesting and thrilling.
Hockney's love of life
Hockney had spread so much joy through his works, and his love of life.
He said famously, it is joie de vivre that keeps him going and it is lack of joie de vivre that will kill you.
He also said, with a hearty laugh, that the opposite of fear of death, is love of life!
I draw flowers every day and send them to my friends so they get fresh blooms every morning!
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