Howard Hodgkin Quotes
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I never think that anything I do is courageous.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.
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It is simply impossible to control a large painting with the edge in the same way that you can control a small one.
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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.
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When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.
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In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.
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A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.
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I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.
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My pictures really finish themselves.
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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.
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I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.
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I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?
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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.
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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.
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My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything.
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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.
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I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.
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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.
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I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously.
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Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.
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To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.
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The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.
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A lot of people... are afraid of pictures which have visible emotions in them. They feel calmer in front of pictures which are placid.
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It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.
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My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.
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I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.
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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.
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