Howard Hodgkin quotes
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“I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“I think words come between the spectator and the picture.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
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“In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“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 -
“My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
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“The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“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 -
“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 -
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“To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.”
-- Howard HodgkinSource : "Howard Hodgkin: the Later, Greater Hodgkin". Interview with Karen Wright, www.telegraph.co.uk. April 05, 2008.
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“You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“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 -
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“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 -
“A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.”
-- Howard HodgkinSource : "The Rise of the Cult of Rembrandt: Reinventing an Old Master in Nineteenth-Century France". Book by Alison MacQueen, 2003.
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“I never think that anything I do is courageous.”
-- Howard HodgkinSource : "Howard Hodgkin: the later, greater Hodgkin". Interview with Karen Wright, www.telegraph.co.uk. April 5, 2008.
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“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 -
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“Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
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“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 -
“I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything.”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
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“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 HodgkinSource : Interview with Antony Peattie, howard-hodgkin.com. October 19, 1993.
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“I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?”
-- Howard Hodgkin -
“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
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