From A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford (p.98-100)

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Martin Gayford: Why do you use so many different means and media to make art?

David Hockney: Anyone who likes drawing and mark-making would like to explore new media. I’m not a mad technical person, but anything visual appeals to me. Media are about how you make marks, or don’t make them. In linocuts, for example, everything has to be bold. You don’t make tiny, thin lines in a linocut, it would be too niggly. But get an etching plate, and it’s about fine lines. Anyone who draws will enjoy that sort of variety of graphic medium, because it requires inventiveness. Rembrandt, like van Gogh, made a great variety of mark. They both had great, great graphic invention.

Martin Gayford: Rembrandt was a printmaker, but van Gogh, with a few exceptions, wasn’t. What has made you such a prolific maker of prints in all manner of media? Why the constant experimentation?

David Hockney: I’ve always been interested in printing as a medium, and also as a medium through which my work can be known — can reach a public. So I’ve taken an interest in any technology to do with image-making: printing, cameras, reproduction itself. Lots of artists aren’t interested and don’t necessarily have to be. A painter needn’t care about any of them; he could still do interesting paintings just with brushes and paints. But I am interested.

Martin Gayford: But why choose one rather than another? And why choose one that makes only a limited range of marks, like a fax machine for example?

David Hockney: You might choose a medium because of a certain subject, or do the same subject in different media and see how different they are. Limitations are really good for you. They are a stimulant. If you were told to make a drawing of a tulip using five lines, or one using a hundred, you’d have to me more inventive with the five. After all, drawing in itself is always a limitation. It’s black or white, or line or not line, charcoal, pencil, pen. You might have a bit of colour — but if you use only three colours, you’ve got to make them look whatever colour you want. What did Picasso say? ‘If you haven’t got any red, use blue.’ Make blue look like red.

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View Hockney’s iPad paintings. And an animated Hockney iPad drawing. And a review of the book, by Margaret Drabble, in The Guardian.