Art & Creativity Quote by Howard Hodgkin

“I hate painting” lands like a provocation because it comes from someone who spent a lifetime proving the opposite in public. Howard Hodgkin wasn’t a dilettante taking a swing at the medium; he was an artist whose canvases feel obsessively labored over, revised, and emotionally freighted. That tension is the point. The line reads less as a confession of disinterest than as a candid glimpse of the grind behind the glow.

In studio culture, “hate” often means intimacy. Painting is slow, bodily, and humiliating in the way only a craft can be: it refuses your first idea, exposes your taste gaps, and forces you to watch your own limitations dry in real time. Hodgkin’s work, with its dense color and stubborn surfaces, suggests a relationship defined by friction. If you’re making paintings that behave like memories - smeared, layered, never quite finished - you’re also signing up for the anxiety of never getting it exactly right.

The subtext is almost managerial: don’t romanticize this. Saying he hates painting punctures the myth of the artist as a blissed-out conduit for inspiration. It reframes painting as a difficult partner, not a muse. That stance also doubles as a defense against the market’s appetite for charming narratives. Better to offer an unpretty truth: the pleasure is real, but it’s earned through irritation, repetition, and the private dread that the next canvas won’t work.