Howard Hodgkin famous quotes

I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Thinking #Paint

I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Thinking

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Thinking #Spectators

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Artist #Portraits #Envious

In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Worry #Looks #England

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Art #New York #School

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Thinking #Rooms #Painter

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Looks #Painting #Surprising

The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Communication #Artist #Feelings

It is simply impossible to control a large painting with the edge in the same way that you can control a small one.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Way #Impossible #Painting

A lot of people... are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#People #Emotion #Placid

My pictures really finish themselves.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Finishing

To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Painting #Painter #Endangered Species

It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Eye #Long #Gleam

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Winning #Subjects

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Art #Historical #Periods

A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Artist #Thinking #Energy

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Painting #Made #Subjects

I never think that anything I do is courageous.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Thinking #Courageous

Eventually, a collection ceases to be a personal indulgence and assumes its own identity. In fact, it becomes a thing in its own right - rather like Frankenstein's monster.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Identity #Monsters #Facts

Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Lying #Passion #Next

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Extravagance #Too Much #Way

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Teamwork #Self #Want

The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Technique #Century #Surface

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Artist #Looks #Painting

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Artist #Isolated #Persons

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Gallery #Soothing #Copies

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Say Anything #Use #Able

I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#People #Wish #Expected

I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Thinking #Looks #Wells

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.
-- Howard Hodgkin

#Artist #Criticism #Way