Creativity Quote by David Hockney

Hockney’s “big space” sounds like a shrug until you hear the confession inside it: desire masquerading as discovery. He isn’t describing a neutral aesthetic preference; he’s admitting that his eye had already chosen its addiction before his mind could name it. That slight, almost offhand phrasing - “what I didn’t know” - frames the attraction as something primal, pre-verbal, the way you fall for a landscape or a person and only later build a story around it.

In Hockney’s case, “big space” carries real biographical weight. A British artist who made his most iconic work under the wide skies of California, he’s long been preoccupied with how to stage openness: pools that look like portals, roads that pull you forward, hills that refuse to sit still. The line also nods to his technical restlessness. From photo-collages to multi-panel canvases to iPad drawings, Hockney keeps trying to break the single-window view tradition in Western painting. “Big space” is what linear perspective promises but often sterilizes; he wants space you can inhabit, not just measure.

The subtext is a quiet argument with modern life’s cramped frames. Cities, screens, galleries, even cameras compress the world into rectangles. Hockney’s attraction is to the opposite: expansiveness as a psychological need, a kind of visual breathing room. The genius of the quote is how it recasts ambition as appetite. He didn’t set out to “do” space; he kept chasing it because it kept making him feel alive.