Painters From England

"Highly to the credit of this artist [Turner], he is indebted principally to his own exertions for the abilities which he possesses as a painter, and for the respectable situation he holds in society. He may be considered a striking instance of how much may be gained by industry (if accompanied by temperance), even without the assistance of a master. The way he acquired his professional powers was by borrowing, where he could, a drawing or picture to copy from, or by making a sketch of any one in the Exhibition early in the morning, and finishing it at home. By such practices, and by a patient perseverance, he has overcome all the difficulties of the art; so that the fine taste and colour which his drawings possess are scarcely to be found in any other, and are accompanied with a broad, firm chiaroscuro and a light and elegant touch."

"When conventions are old, there's quite a good reason, it's not arbitrary. So Picasso discovered that, as it were, and I'm sure that for him that was probably almost as exciting as discovering Cubism, rediscovering conventions of ordinary appearance, one-point perspective or something. The purists think you're going backwards, but I know you'd go forward. Future art that is based on appearances won't look like the art that's gone before. Even revivals of a period are not the same. The Renaissance is not the same as ancient Greece; the Gothic revival is not the same as Gothic. It might look like that at first, but you can tell it's not. The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn't necessarily be."

"What I always longed to do was to be able to paint like I can draw, most artists would tell you that, they would all like to paint like they can draw."

"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, he thought of them as working drawings. I understand what he was doing: discovering what's there. And then when you come to use line, if you know what you're looking at, it's much easier to make the line meaningful, to find a linear solution to what you want to depict."

"Any artist will tell you he's really only interested in the stuff he's doing now. He will, always. It's true, and it should be like that."

"How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don't. There's a hierarchy. Why do I pick out that thing, that thing, that thing?"

"All art is contemporary, if it's alive. And if it's not alive, what's the point of it?"

"The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway — it is called medication."

"Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look."

"How can Blair fight a war on terror? Terror is not an ideology or an army; terror is a technique."

"There's no doubt you smoke to calm yourself. I know I do. That's my decision about how I keep calm. I prefer that to Prozac. In fact I think it's healthier. I couldn't go to another New York party where they're all drinking water and on Prozac and telling you off for smoking."

"I'm aware it's now a hostile city [New York City]. I feel I'm in school, actually. There are signs everywhere you don't get in any other city. When you see all the smokers outside a building in New York, I just think the building is full of bad-mannered people who haven't thought, "We'll give them a little room to smoke in." That's what a reasonable person, a person with good manners, would do."

"I can get excitement watching rain on a puddle. And then I paint it. Now, I admit, there are not too many people who would find that exciting. But I would. And I want life thrilling and rich. And it is. I make sure it is."

"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!"

"Interviewer: Love is certainly at the center of tolerance. They're intertwined, in a certain way. It helps you appreciate difference. Hockney: Yes. And that's probably why I do portraits. Everybody's different; they look different, and are different. Maybe deep, deep down we're all the same. But on the surface we seem to be different, don't we?"

"It sometimes takes a foreigner to come and see a place and paint it. I remember someone saying they had never really noticed the palm trees here until I painted them."

"He [Hockney's father] hardly ever left Bradford. He was a member of CND and a socialist with a rather romantic and naive idea of what Soviet Russia was like, all cornfields and ballet. He would have gone mad for email because he was always sending letters to world leaders — Eisenhower, Mao, Stalin — telling them what was what. I think he imagined the Politburo would hold up his letter and say, "Hold everything, Kenneth Hockney has written again!""

"I usually only draw myself in down periods. I do, actually. I suppose that's why I often draw myself looking grim. I just think, "Let's have a look in the mirror." When you are alone and you look in a mirror you never put on a pleasing smile. Well, you don't, do you?"

"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."

"We live in an age where the artist is forgotten. He is a researcher. I see myself that way."

"If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed."

"Television is becoming a collage — there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different."

"In one gallery they actually had a notice which said "No Sketching." How obnoxious! I said, "How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?""

"I've started painting much more freely, and faster. I think it's working in the theatre that did it. You know what the Glyndebourne scene-painters said about my The Magic Flute? They said they had to wear sunglasses to paint it."

"Love Poem / Beyond watching eyes / With sweet and tender kisses / Our souls reached out to each other / In breathless wonder // And when I awoke / From a vast and smiling peace / I found you bathed in morning light / Quietly studying / All the messages on my phone"

""When the paintings suddenly started going for, like, really big money it definitely weirded me out, and I kind of went away to the middle of nowhere and I stopped making any more paintings. But the whole time the auction houses were just selling paintings that I’d done years before and sold for not much money. Or paintings that I traded for a haircut or, you know, an ounce of weed and they were going for like 50 grand." (lightly edited)"

"I can't help feeling it was a bit easier when all I had to compete against was a dustbin down an alley rather than, you know, a Gainsborough or something."

"Is graffiti art or vandalism? That word has a lot of negative connotations and it alienates people, so no, I don't like to use the word 'art' at all."

"I mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time."

""[I first picked up a spray can] the day someone ram-raided the Halfords round the corner from our house." — Venue magazine (taken from "Home Sweet Home - Banksy's Bristol" by Steve Wright)"

""You could stick all my shit in Tate Modern and have an opening with Tony Blair and Kate Moss on roller blades handing out vol-au-vents and it wouldn't be as exciting as it is when you go out and paint something big where you shouldn't do." — The Guardian, 2003 (taken from "Home Sweet Home - Banksy's Bristol" by Steve Wright)"

""The craft is finding a decent drainpipe to get access to the site as much as it is in the art... Van Gogh used short, stumpy brush strokes to convey his insanity - I use short, thin ledges above mainline train tracks." — Evening Post, 2004 (taken from "Home Sweet Home - Banksy's Bristol" by Steve Wright)"

""I pretty much use sketchbooks to note down great ideas of somebody else I've just had. A good sketchbook means you don't actually need to bother with having a memory yourself. You can get away with a fair bit of substance abuse if you always carry a notepad and a sharp pencil around with you." [from "Street Sketchbook" by Tristan Manco]"

"Some people want to make the world a better place. I just wanna make the world a better-looking place. If you don't like it, you can paint over it!"

""The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little." [taken from Adbusters magazine]"

""A lot of people think that scuttling around stenciling images onto buildings in the middle of the night is the action of a sad, frustrated individual who can't get attention or recognition any other way. They might be right, but I've done gallery shows and, if you've been hitting on people with all sorts of images in all sorts of places, they're a real step backwards, painting the streets means becoming an actual part of the city. It's not a spectator sport." — Tristan Manco, Stencil Graffiti"

""Nearly a hundred pictures are featured here. Each and every one of them a pathetic cry for help." — The Guardian"

"Well I'm frustrated by many things but trying to get accepted by the art world isn't one of them. This seems difficult for some people to understand - you do not paint graffiti in the vain hope that one day some big fat tory will discover you and put your pictures on his wall. If you draw on walls in public then you are already operating on a higher level."

"At least graffiti has a fighting chance of meaning a little more to people. Graffiti has been used to start revolutions, stop wars and generally is the voice of people who aren't listened to. Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. and even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss."

"Some people think you should have better things to think about than trying to think about better things. But the instinct is still there."

"Pace yourself and repeat [graffitiing] as often as you feel inadequate and no-one listens to a word you say."

"Every time I hear the word culture I release the safety catch on my 9mm."

"It's great when you love someone so much you can sleep with other people behind their back and it doesn't even matter."

"Someone famous once said 'It takes two people to make a piece of art. One person to make the art and another person to stop them from destroying it.' Which is a more poetic than saying: 'It takes two people to make a piece of art. One person to make the art and another person to come round later from the council and sand-blast it off."

"'Only boys with small dicks paint pictures of big guns' - a girl in the pub overlooking Mono Lisa [holding a rocket launcher], Soho"

"Doing what you're told is generally overrated."

"They say that if you gave monkeys a thousand typewriters at some point you'd have yourself a novel. I was wondering if you gave a thousand monkeys a thousand stick of dynamite how long would it take for them to make the city a more beautiful looking place."

"I think I was lucky to learn so young that there's no such thing as justice and there's nothing you can do about it. The more useful lesson I learnt was that there's no point in behaving yourself. You will probably be punished for something you never did anyway. People get it wrong all the time."

"I like ironies unless they're real. I was arrested for painting a picture about corruption over a billboard. As a result I spent 40 hours in a cell with the cops taking the piss and telling me lies, followed by a spell of community service and a hefty fine for which I never got a receipt and no record appeared to be kept."

"There are no exceptions to the rule that everyone thinks they are an exception to the rules."