David Hockney

Feature due to appear shortly in The national magazine.


DAVID HOCKNEY
By John Kelleher for The National

When you ask David Hockney how many cigarettes he smokes a day he simply shrugs, though five minutes into a conversation in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London he is already lighting-up for the second time.

But he is clearer about his art. He produces a new work every day.

Hockney, now 74, is the grand old man of British art and doesn’t suffer rules gladly. An Internet search reveals smoking as a present preoccupation but if you graze for images, his popular California swimming pools paintings from the 1970s predominate.

California seems a lifetime away in London’s autumn sunshine where, as he puffs, Hockney fulminates. “I am sick and tired of people telling us what we can and can’t do. Smokers get a very rough deal.”

His voice is rising, to the consternation of an Academy minder. “David. You promised you wouldn’t.“

But the artist is in full stride with a captivated audience. “People say cigar smoking kills you. I would like to say loudly” (his voice now booming out and attracting the attention of tourists) “that smoking cigars never killed anyone.”

He adds: “We are all addicted to something. I am addicted to lots of things. In particular I am addicted to art.“ And it is the art that matters most.

His latest works as an artist, due to go on show in London after Christmas, will reveal another newer addiction – the landscape of his childhood – the woods and fields of East Yorkshire presented with a luminous intensity.

From the playful young artist who dyed his hair in the 1960s – “because blondes have more fun” – through his frank depictions of the hedonistic lifestyle of Los Angeles to his current persona as an ageing curmudgeon, Hockney has always been uncompromising.

But controversy has always been counterpointed by a constant flow of terrific art - enjoyed around the world and attracting both increasing acclaim and ever higher prices. The Yorkshire-born artist is in London on a brief visit from his present base at Bridlington in Yorkshire for a sneak preview of the Academy’s big Hockney show, coming in January, entitled “A Bigger Picture.” It is part of the cultural Olympiad running up to the 2012 Olympic games.

“Its not two thousand and twelve” he scolds a representative from the show’s sponsor BNP Paribas during a press conference. “It’s twenty twelve. Perhaps by the time we get to 2066 people will have got it.”

In cold print Hockney may sound testy but in person all his anger is delivered with a wry smile and a northern sense of humour. It’s a personality that has made him one of the best-loved artists in Britain. His work has made him one of the most admired and respected. And he has long been one of the most articulate of the nation’s painters.

Hockney has avoided the post-modern provocations and conceptual japes of younger British artists like Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. Instead he has devoted most of his career to painting but with regular forays into other media.

But to label him old-fashioned would be to misrepresent the radicalism at the heart of his art and his constant willingness to experiment.

His latest departure will be unveiled at the January show – a way of representing the landscape of his beloved Yorkshire in a series of multi-screen films produced by locking together nine video cameras.

The cameras were clamped into a frame and mounted on the front of a jeep. As the vehicle moves slowly through the woods the images captured force the viewer to look much more closely at the details of the landscape.

They’ll be given their first full exposure in January, but Hockney confides he hopes to smuggle them into the public’s awareness earlier by persuading TV shows like the BBC’s Countryfile to show them.

One of the films portrays Woldgate Woods through four seasons. “It took a whole year to make this and each of the films is an hour and a half long. We could have filled four walls with it.”

And once again Hockney has no time for rules that get in the way of creativity. “If you tried to do this in California they’d stop you immediately and say you need a permit to do that. Here in Yorkshire no one ever stopped me.

“I did get a ticket one day for not wearing a seat belt. If they’d found us driving along with all this stuff, all these cameras, on a jeep, I’d probably be in prison. But you have got to bend the rules.”

In the past Hockney has been what the digital age dubs “an early adopter.” He believes that throughout history, technical innovation has created dramatic new ways for artists to work.

In 2006, when he first unveiled some of his large scale Yorkshire landscapes in at London’s Annely Juda Gallery he said: “Constable would have been thrilled to work on this scale, but his problem was that he did not have tubes of paint. The invention of the collapsible tube was necessary for the burst of plein-air painting that was Impressionism.”





In his long career he has experimented with photocopiers and fax machines and, 20 years ago, used a Quantel digital paintbox – a television graphics tool – to create art live on TV. He has used montages of photographs to offer a more incisive exploration of landscapes, interiors and portraits with multiple viewpoints through time and space (echoing the Cubist experiments of his beloved Picasso).

In his 1993 book “The Way I See It” he said of Picasso; “What he did may appear distorted, but only if you think of one particular way of seeing, which is from a distance and always in a kind of stopped, frozen time. The minute you realise what Picasso is doing, how he is using time as well and that is why you can see around the back of a body as well as the front, once you realise that it becomes a very profound experience.”

“A Bigger Picture” isn’t actually a retrospective as it focuses solely on the landscape paintings Hockney has produced since the late 1950s. An equally vast show could be devoted to his portraiture and other work.

The earliest piece here is virtually juvenilia – a sketch of his Yorkshire countryside made early in his art school days. His vivid work in California and in other parts of the world will also be represented.

But the undoubted star attraction will be a huge collection of new work made since he returned to the landscape of his earliest years in the woods and fields of East Yorkshire in 2005. He says it’ll make the region look as exciting as the Grand Canyon.

They range from a vivid series of coloured works drawn swiftly on his iPad to vast multi panelled paintings of woods and fields, transformed from seemingly unremarkable places few would notice to groves of luminous beauty.



Throughout his long decades abroad, Hockney had returned to Yorkshire regularly to visit his parents at Christmas and, after his father’s death, to see his mother and sister. He also spent a long time there during the final illness of his friend Jonathan Silver, founder of the Salts Mill Gallery near Shipley that is largely devoted to Hockney’s work.

“I spent 30 Christmases in Yorkshire, but though it's a landscape I knew from my childhood I never really thought of it as a subject until about ten years ago when I realised that at my age it would be a wonderful subject – a marvellous place where it was quiet and we would be left alone.”

One of the revelations was the change of the seasons – something he says he missed in California.

“Not many people would think this landscape is unique and there’s not many people here which is nice because you can drive and walk around and there is no-one else. It’s unknown. It is actually very lovely. Little valleys with no rivers in them because it’s a glacial landscape and they’re hidden.”

Now he has spent years in these woods looking and learning about when the best time to paint is, the direction of the sun, the changing play of light.

“A friend came up recently and I got him up at 5.30 and took him into the woods and I said – ‘look now everything is incredibly clear, everything is well defined.’ It is only like this at 6.30 in the morning when the sun is low on the east coast. I said you’ve got to know the optimum time to look at something in nature. Look at the way van Eyck painted his foliage. He must have known the best time.

Hockney used to do opera set design, but his increasing deafness forced him to stop. But deafness has helped him in other ways. “ As I was losing my hearing I noticed I was seeing Yorkshire more clearly. I can’t hear spatially now, but my visual spatial awareness has increased dramatically. So for me this disability is an advantage.”

For Hockney, his art is about an intensity of looking and seeing the world anew. It is also, he says, about sharing this intensity – making people look at things differently.

He says: “To get the most out of the world around you you’ve got to really look hard. Most people out walking in the woods don’t really look. They just glance around. They scan.

“Before I start a painting I spend a hell of a lot of time looking and thinking, I go out in the car and pull a chair out of the boot and sit in the woods. I sit there and smoke and just look.”

The way Hockney talks about his art, nature and the world you get a sense of spiritual intensity. He once wrote: “I think the world is beautiful and, that if we don’t think it is, then we’re doomed as a species. I don’t think there is a place in the natural world that we would call ugly. It tends to be the man-made things that can be called ugly.”

But he is not religious. “ I lived in Los Angeles for a long time and I was always aware of the power of nature there because the earth trembles. But I’m touched by what Van Gogh once said. He’d lost the faith of his father, but found another one in the infinity of nature. I feel that.”

Of the show’s likely impact he says:” Maybe people will watch the following spring more carefully. Get more pleasure, more enjoyment from the world. Enjoy the world. That’s what I say.”


DAVID HOCKNEY BIO BOX By John Kelleher

When the 1960s started to swing David Hockney was there to help get the party started – still an art student when he was declared one of the founders of the British pop art scene.

Less steely than its American counterpart, the pop art visions of Hockney, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Richard Hamilton were at the playful end of the spectrum. Hockney’s mop of dyed blonde hair, funny glasses and Northern sensibilities placed him at the heart of that era’s revolt into style alongside The Beatles and Rolling Stones, the photographer David Bailey and Twiggy.

But he was a bit older than most of them. He was born in Bradford in Yorkshire in 1937 to working class parents and after going to Bradford College of Art spent two years doing National Service as a hospital orderly before going off to the prestigious Royal College of Art in London.

He was still studying when his work was included in the 1961 Royal Academy show Young Contemporaries - alongside Peter Blake - that proclaimed the arrival of British Pop Art.

Hockney has been a rebel without a pause ever since, making waves and ruffling feathers with his uncompromising stance on everything from smoking and gay sexuality to controversial claims about how the Old Masters made their work outlined in his 2001 book “Secret Knowledge.”

But Hockney’s work has always transcended mere fashion and could never be caged with one movement.




In 1963 he had his first one man show in London at the Kasmin Gallery and that same year he started to travel internationally, actually spending much of the hedonistic party decade of the 1960s outside the UK. In 1963 he visited New York and was then commissioned by The Sunday Times in London to produce a series of images in Egypt.

That year he also moved to America – living in and teaching in Los Angeles, Iowa and Colorado. In 1968 he came back to London, then lived and worked in Paris from 1973 to 1975

His reputation grew throughout the 1960s with several solo exhibitions in London, Paris and New York and participation in many group shows. But his real fame grew after he moved to Los Angeles and started to produce his popular images of swimming pools and the California landscape and lifestyle with allusions to his gay sexuality. The period was celebrated in the highly successful movie “A Bigger Splash.” (1973)

In the decades that followed Hockney worked widely in different parts of the world – travelling to China in 1981 with the writer Stephen Spender with whom he collaborated on a book, “China Diary.”

He has designed widely for the theatre and Opera, has been bold in experimenting in unexpected media and trying such new technology as the Polaroid camera, fax machine, photocopier, the iPhone and the iPad. The show in London in 2012 will unveil innovative use of video.

Hockney lived and worked in Los Angeles for nearly 25 years, but at the end of the 1990s returned to Britain, settling at Bridlington in East Yorkshire to be near his ageing mother. He was worked on landscapes there ever since.

His first giant scale work “A Bigger Grand Canyon” was unveiled in Paris in 1999 – a vast study of the Arizona landmark. It featured sixty painted panels. The 2012 show will feature many more large works made up of multiple canvases.