1.
The only way an artist can communicate with the world at large is on the level of feeling.
Howard Hodgkin
2.
I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.
Howard Hodgkin
3.
You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.
Howard Hodgkin
4.
When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.
Howard Hodgkin
5.
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
6.
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
7.
I think words come between the spectator and the picture.
Howard Hodgkin
8.
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
9.
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
10.
Passion lies between one mark and the next, and also within all of them.
Howard Hodgkin
11.
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
12.
I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.
Howard Hodgkin
13.
My pictures really finish themselves.
Howard Hodgkin
14.
I dont think you can lightly paint a picture. Its an activity I take very seriously.
Howard Hodgkin
15.
I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.
Howard Hodgkin
16.
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
17.
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
18.
To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.
Howard Hodgkin
19.
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
20.
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
21.
My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.
Howard Hodgkin
22.
I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?
Howard Hodgkin
23.
I never think that anything I do is courageous.
Howard Hodgkin
24.
It takes a long time for the gleam in the eye to turn into something solid.
Howard Hodgkin
25.
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
26.
I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.
Howard Hodgkin
27.
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
28.
My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldnt be able to say anything.
Howard Hodgkin
29.
In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.
Howard Hodgkin
30.
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
31.
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
