Drawing: The Bigger Message

"...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.  It's breathtaking in Rembrandt, Picasso and Van Gogh.  To achieve that is hard work, but stimulating: finding how to reduce everything you're looking at to just lines - lines that contain volume in between them..."
"...I thought one of the saddest things ever was the abandonment of drawing in art schools...When it was given up I kept arguing with people.  They said we don't need it anymore.  But I said that giving up drawing is leaving everything to photography, which isn't going to be that interesting.  At one meeting I went to, they said, 'Oh, I see it's back to the life room, is it Hockney?' I said, 'No, forward to the life room!'
David Hockney in conversations with Martin Gayford


Extracts from one of the most fascinating art books I have read in a long while: "A Bigger Message Conversations with David Hockney" by Martin Gayford.  A must for Hockney fans like me and those trying to look far beyond their normal range of vision, far beyond their current boundaries.