Love Quote by David Hockney

Hockney’s blunt little hierarchy does two things at once: it flatters Van Gogh while quietly defending Hockney’s own lifelong suspicion that “skill” isn’t the same as stakes. He’s not describing a neutral museum stroll so much as a jolt of calibration. “Another level” sounds casual, almost boyish, but it’s the language of a working artist measuring voltage. You can hear the shift from appreciation to awe: Sargent is “love,” pleasure, virtuosity; Van Gogh is escalation, a kind of heat.

The subtext is a debate about what painting is for. Sargent represents mastery that can border on seduction: surfaces that glow, brushwork that looks effortless, portraits that make class and charisma feel inevitable. Hockney admires that seduction but refuses to confuse it with necessity. Van Gogh, by contrast, is held up as painting that risks looking wrong in order to be true. The portrait isn’t just well made; it feels lived, strained, urgent. “Higher level” isn’t moralizing so much as acknowledging intensity: the sense that the artist is paying for every inch of the image.

Context matters: Hockney came up in a Britain that worshipped old-master finish and also inherited modernism’s insistence on authenticity. He’s spent decades arguing, in paint and polemic, that perception is an active, restless thing. His offhand ranking is really a manifesto in miniature: technique can be dazzling, but the work that changes you is the work that pushes past polish into presence.