Martin Gayford > Quotes

“Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory - where it stays - it's transmitted by your hands.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don't keep office hours.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“I think I'm greedy, but I'm not greedy for money - because that can be a burden - I'm greedy for an exciting life. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I get it, actually. On the other hand, I can find excitement, I admit, in raindrops falling on a puddle and a lot of people wouldn't. I intend to have it exciting until the day I fall over.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“Most people feel that the world looks like the photograph. I've always assumed that the photograph is nearly right, but that little bit by which it misses makes it miss by a mile. This is what I grope at.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“In London, too, there's always someone dropping in, but not here - it's too awkward a place to get to. I like people to come and stay. I'm not anti-social; I'm just unsocial.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“When you are drawing, you are always one or two marks ahead. You're always thinking, 'After what I'm doing here I'll go there, and there.' It's like chess or something. In drawing I've always thought economy of means was a great quality - not always in painting, but always in drawing.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“Only after seeing the winter, do you comprehend the richness of summer. This was a big theme, and one I could confidently do: the infinite variety of nature.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“After I'd drawn the grasses, I started seeing them. Whereas if you'd just photographed them, you wouldn't be looking as intently as you do when you are drawing, so it wouldn't affect you that much.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“Eight years ago, I wouldn't have painted this subject I'm starting now: a clearing filled with grasses. It would have seemed too much of a jumble. I had to keep looking and drawing, and looking. Now, because of all that time I spent drawing these grasses, I know what I'm looking for.”
― Martin Gayford, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

“Time is his luxury, and he is prepared to spend any amount that is necessary to get a picture right, which is another paradox, since by nature LF is packed with nervous energy and still apt, for example, to dive into traffic and sprint down the road in pursuit of a taxi. ‘All my patience’, he notes, ‘has gone into my work, leaving none for my life.”
― Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

“There is an odd but revealing phrase – ‘in the flesh’ – for seeing art in reality, not reproduction. With Lotto and other Venetian painters it’s almost exact: to appreciate them properly you have to stand in front of them. Only then can you sense the carnal reality of the people they depict, the glistening of their skin, gleam in their eyes, the weight of their bodies, the texture of their clothes. These are physical experiences, because paint is a physical substance: a layer of organic and inorganic chemicals that reflects the light, and consequently changes every time the light alters. There is no substitute for being there.”
― Martin Gayford, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

“His sonnet no. 152 uses the metaphor of sculpture for salvation: ‘By what we take away, lady, we give to a rugged mountain stone/A figure that can live? And which grows greater when the stone grows less.’ Here was the fascination with sculpture as an act of discovery within a piece of marble: by chipping away, the figure was slowly revealed.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“A great deal of the information embedded in a work of art is not – yet at least – accessible just by looking at an image of it while sitting at home. The deepest and richest experiences are not virtual but physical: they involve looking at real things and talking to real people.”
― Martin Gayford, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

“Night’ was a code word for sodomy in Tuscan comic literature – as is suggested by the title of the magistrates specifically detailed to deal with the problem, the Officers of the Night. According to court records, most encounters between casual male partners took place between sunset, when work ended, and the third or fourth hour after nightfall, the time of curfew, when the taverns closed.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“He never signed anything ever again, because he didn’t need to. From this point onwards, it was always obvious whose work this was. It was installed by July 1500 – if not before. The Pietà made his name: he was twenty-five years old.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“There lies a paradox for a dedicated lover of art such as David or me: we devote a great deal of time and energy in the pursuit of art, diligently visiting museums, galleries, churches, mosques, temples and ruins where it is to be found. But of course much of what we look at was made for completely different reasons by pious Buddhists, Christians, Hindus and Moslems.”
― Martin Gayford, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

“If you are painter it’s your whole existence. It’s not an activity”
― Martin Gayford, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

“so often with Michelangelo, the strangeness is inseparable from the power of the work.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“The Chinese phrase for pilgrimage means literally ‘paying one’s respect to mountains’.”
― Martin Gayford, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

“the picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life’.”
― Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

“you can do a couple of days a week, then do something else. It’s a bit like being an athlete. You have to keep fit and nimble.”
― Martin Gayford, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

“The popular reaction to David seems to have been wonder at his size rather than at the artistry of his carving. He was a spectacle, a freakish oddity.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“Mental stamina is required too. All long-term projects require this ability to keep going after the first excitement, through periods of despondency.”
― Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

“The pursuit of art is a journey that never stops; the more you see, the more you want to see.”
― Martin Gayford, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

“In fact, a great deal of life and art is about serendipity: discovering shapes and forms in the confusion around us, beginning with those prehistoric painters noticing that a mark on the side of a cave looked a bit like a bison, or Leonardo looking at an old, stained wall and seeing battles or landscapes.”
― Martin Gayford, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

“But then, perhaps when we contemplate one of these sculptures we are not really looking at the Pharaoh Sesostris or Senusret but, as LF put it, at humanity. Nearly”
― Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

“looks promising and I’ve taken it up again on occasion. But whenever I did, I realized why I’d not carried on in the first place – in the same way that a specialist might say of a child, that one’s not going to grow up right. I could tell that it wouldn’t develop into a finished picture.”
― Martin Gayford, Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

“To understand Michelangelo and his art, it is necessary to accept both these truths. He believed that the sight of beautiful individuals was a path to the divine beauty and goodness of God. Simultaneously, it was a source of hopeless erotic yearning.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life

“Were they not avid, even unseemly, pursuers of publicity? On the contrary, they responded, there was football in the newspaper every day, but their work was scarcely ever mentioned. ‘We think that there is an enormous hunger out there for art, and most people can never see a Gilbert & George picture’, George expounded, ‘So the publicity is not for us, it’s for the viewer: informing the viewer that there are pictures he can go and see.’ Gilbert chimed in: ‘Artists are extremely unfamous’, and George echoed solemnly: ‘Extremely unfamous.”
― Martin Gayford, The Pursuit of Art: Travels, Encounters and Revelations

“But Michelangelo did not want us to know how he learned to sculpt and, whatever the truth of the matter, he succeeded in suppressing it. The impression he wanted to pass down was that he just picked up the art of sculpture through sheer brilliance and inherent understanding of design; conceivably, that might even be correct.”
― Martin Gayford, Michelangelo: His Epic Life