Howard Hodgkin Quotes

36 quotes in 390 categories

• 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…
• A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.
• I never think that anything I do is 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 -…
• Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.
• 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…
• I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.
• 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.
• 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…
• I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.
• I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.
• My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything.
• I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.
• I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?
• 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…
• 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…
• You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.
• I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.
• I think words come between the spectator and the picture.
• I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

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