David Hockney

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford – review

The artist talks about trees and landscape

Margaret Drabble
guardian.co.uk, Friday 14 October 2011 22.55 BST


David Hockney painting The Road to Thwing, Late Spring. © David Hockney/Photograph by Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima/Thames & Hudson

This book is a celebration of trees and bigger trees and some of the biggest landscape paintings in art history. It is about much more than that, but trees are at its massive, strongly beating, very English heart, and David Hockney's discovery of them is an invitation to us all to look better, see better, enjoy more.


A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney
by Martin Gayford

The beautifully illustrated (and very fairly priced) volume takes the form of conversations with Hockney's art historian friend Martin Gayford (they are designated on the page as DH and MG). MG prompts DH to talk about his move from California to Bridlington, his preparation for his forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy, his views on the differences between painting and photography, and his ongoing love affair with new digital techniques.

Hockney loves trees, he loves gadgets, and he loves to paint. The combination of these enthusiasms is producing, in his 70s, some huge works on an epic scale of mind-changing colour and glory, as well as some miniatures drawn on his iPad. These domestic sketches – the view from his bedroom window with a street light, his bedroom curtains, a bowl of flowers, a cactus, an ashtray – appear as if by magic nearly every morning in the inboxes of his friends. This man is blessed with great gifts, and he shares them with great generosity. He says he has found a new lease of life. "I would never have expected to be painting with such ambitions at this age. I seem to have more energy that I did a decade ago, when I was 60." His work rejuvenates him, it rejuvenates us all. DH is very inclusive.

Trees are long-lived, they become old friends and then they outlive us. DH claims "they are the largest manifestation of the life-force we see. No two trees are the same, like us." MG includes in his commentary Constable's description of the "young lady" ash tree on Hampstead Heath, together with a reproduction of Constable's 1821 Study of the Trunk of an Elm Tree, with its extraordinary details of bark, and he also quotes from Colin Tudge's The Secret Life of Trees, a book both he and Hockney admire. Trees are "like human figures in the landscape, vegetable giants, some elegant, some heroic, some sinister ... but they are also remarkable feats of natural engineering, capable of holding up a tonne of leaves in summer against the forces of gravity and wind". This observation draws Hockney on to speak of the spatial thrill of trees and their capturing of light – a winter tree helps you to sense space, a summer tree in leaf is a container of light – and also to the theme of the changing of the seasons and the changing light of every day.

Hockney has learned to watch the seasons acutely since he moved back to his native Yorkshire. He knows when to catch the hawthorn in bloom, and gets up early with his nine-camera team to film leaves turning colour in the autumn and bare trees decked with snow. He films and paints the same deeply familiar tunnel of trees and bushes and notes how the position of the sun changes through the year – a natural phenomenon he'd never noticed in California. (Maybe it doesn't happen in California: Bridlington is, as he often points out, quite a long way north.)

MG, on a 2010 outing to Glyndebourne with DH to see a revival of the 1975 production of The Rake's Progress with Hockney's original sets, remarks as they sit in the grand and formal Sussex gardens on a perfect summer day that the landscape is a "huge natural theatre that is being lit by the sun and the weather in an infinity of varying ways". DH assents, but is soon drawn back to the subject of his humble tunnel on a misty morning: "You get a marvellous range of greens, more detail in the cow parsley. If it had been a sunny day, it would have been a little flatter ... a morning like that is a great rarity." More detail in the cow parsley: that's so English, that's so good.

The landscape of the Yorkshire Wolds is modest, unspectacular, unfrequented, and despite his long absence Hockney says he is now learning to know it as thoroughly as Constable knew East Bergholt and Dedham – he has gone back to his roots. But he hasn't gone to Earth. He is remains deeply interested in the work of his predecessors, and full of lateral thoughts about them. His response to one of the fathers and masters of the outdoor landscape, Claude Lorrain, is fascinatingly quirky: he is full of respect for Claude's trees and the delicacy of his foliage ("It probably isn't that natural, but it looks it") but at the same time he is determined to apply revolutionary photographic Photoshop techniques to "restore" and recreate one of Claude's larger and lesser known paintings, The Sermon on the Mount from the Frick Gallery. Although I have had the good fortune of a an early view of his vast and colourful version, then in his huge rented warehouse on a Bridlington industrial estate, and entitled (like this volume) A Bigger Message, I was too over-excited and over-awed to take in what was happening there. I understood in my ancestral bones the Yorkshire trees and the shady tunnel, but this strange vision in vivid reds and green and blues was like nothing I had ever seen before. "It's not oil paint," as he explains to Gayford, but what is it? It is a virtual Claude, revealing, as the Frick version did not, "the lame and the blind in a pit".

The weird combination of ancient landscape and new gadgetry is exhilarating. Hockney will try anything. He speaks with the greatest admiration of Van Gogh's human vision, his fine draughtsmanship, the speed and energy of his brush strokes, his northerner's joy in the clarity and light of the south (similar to Hockney's own youthful delight in California), his ability to transform the dullest subject, his love of the nondescript, his letters with their little sketches like drawings of drawings – "Van Gogh could draw anything and make it enthralling ... a rundown bathroom or a frayed carpet." Van Gogh distrusted photography, would never pose for a photographer, but his fellow artist DH claims confidently in one of his frequent texts to MG, he would have gone for the iPad. "Van Gogh would have loved it. He could have written his letters on it as well ... Picasso would have gone mad with this."

And so Hockney goes on sketching in his old-fashioned, comfy, hi-tech seaside home. He draws the washing-up in the sink, his own bare foot with its slipper by its side, his cloth cap, just as they happen to catch his eye. And in the warehouse on the estate, the bigger trees and the bigger message grow and grow.

Margaret Drabble's The Millstone is published by Penguin.

My hero: David Hockney

'He is ever-young, ever-reinventing himself as an artist, roaming about here or there and stopping to set it down, ever alert and singing with life and genius'

Susan Hill
guardian.co.uk, Friday 21 October 2011 22.55 BST


David Newnham
Ever young: David Hockney in 1966. Photograph: Jane Bown for the Observer

Being from Scarborough, I admire anyone who admits to hailing from Bridlington, Scarborians thinking nowt o' Brid. But for the world's greatest painter by a country mile to live there, after having enjoyed the vividness of California is a matter for wonder.

Look at a Hockney, look at your world. It has changed: the trees his Yorkshire trees, the sky his Californian sky, cloudscape a Bridlington one, the tulips, elderly mothers, Grimms' fairytale characters – all his.

In my 20s and broke, I was offered a Hockney, of tulips, for 200 quid, riches beyond the dreams of avarice then. I regret that picture almost daily. I still dream about it. Go to Saltaire, near Leeds, to see Hockney: for his theatre and opera designs – no one else has ever got The Magic Flute so right – for pencil drawings of intricate beauty and exactness, photographs based on paintings and paintings based on photographs, for stuff from his youthful heyday in the 60s, stuff from his mad middle years when all he seemed to care about were azure swimming pools and hot sun on bodies, and later, photographic triptychs and astonishing trees, the same trees in different seasons, and the exactly right muddy Yorkshire landscape.

I have a small book of Hockney's illustrations for Grimms' Fairy Tales, spikey, sinister little drawings of Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel, of sticks and straw and long hair and magic mountains. No colour here, everything stark, everything in meticulous black line and half tone. The whole world-picture of the fairytales is gathered together.

Hockney is happy-making, energising. He is ever-young, ever-reinventing himself as an artist, roaming about here or there and stopping to set it down, ever alert and singing with life and genius. I can't draw an egg but he makes me think I could. The only quarrel I have with Hockney is not that he comes from Brid but that he likes dachshunds. It's a small price to pay.

• Susan Hill was a judge for this year's Man Booker prize

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Hockney: The Biography by Christopher Simon Sykes – review

This is a chatty, knowledgeable, insider's biography, full of anecdotes – the drawback is that it ends with the subject still in his 30s, with half his career still to come

Blake Morrison
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 November 2011 09.00 GMT


Endlessly self-renewing … David Hockney with Bigger Trees Near Warter or/ou Peinture en Plein Air pour l'age Post-Photographique at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, May 2007. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images

There's a memorable photo of Alan Bennett and David Hockney sitting side by side in profile, a photo that invites us to think of them as twin spirits: blond, gay, bespectacled, working-class Yorkshiremen who have both made major contributions to British cultural life. But whereas Bennett shuffled awkwardly into the limelight, unsure whether to be a playwright, actor or academic, Hockney – as a new biography by Christopher Simon Sykes makes clear – knew exactly where he was going from the start.


Hockney: The Biography
by Christopher Simon Sykes

He began drawing when barely out of nappies, doodling on scraps of paper, chalking on the kitchen lino, and scribbling marginalia in hymn books or children's comics. There's an engaging reproduction of the family washing-up rota he drew up, with caricatures of his siblings (he was the fourth of five) in various moods. He read widely, too – in childhood Biggles, Dickens and the Brontës; later, as part of discovering his sexuality, Whitman and Cavafy. But a greater influence was American movies. "I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood," he liked to say.

The war years were difficult for the family, not just because of German air raids, but because Hockney's father, Kenneth, was so adamant a conchie that he refused even to take on work such as fire-watching: "YELLOW HOCKNEY" a reproachful neighbour scrawled on the front steps. To scrape some money together, Kenneth began to recondition prams. His skill in painting them left an impression on his son. So did the prams: the teenage David converted one into a mobile artist's studio, wheeling his pots and brushes round Bradford while he looked for suitable subjects to paint. Pubs, fish and chip shops, launderettes and tram wires were all fair game.

He soon earned a reputation as an eccentric. In fact, his clownish wit and subversiveness were apparent from the moment he entered Bradford Grammar as a scholarship boy, where he entertained fellow pupils by mimicking characters from The Goon Show. Discovering that art wasn't taught in the top form, he sabotaged his first-year exams: "Am no good at science, but I can draw" was his sole contribution to the science paper, along with a sketch of the invigilator. His teachers were exasperated, but his art flourished in the bottom form, and the school noticeboard, as Sykes puts it, became "his own personal exhibition space".

Even as a schoolboy he was stubborn in pursuing his vocation. When the local education authority refused to let him transfer to the Bradford School of Art at 14, his mother found someone to teach him calligraphy out of hours. And when he was pushed towards an apprenticeship with a commercial art firm, he dug his heels in so as to go to art school. He already looked the part, a dandy just like his father: they both used the same upmarket second-hand clothes shop. Hockney was nicknamed "Boris", because he dressed like a Russian peasant, whereas his father, in his Castro outfit, forever campaigning for pacifism and communism, was known as Commissar Ken.

Hockney's own campaigning zeal persists to this day, as is evidenced by his frequent contributions to the Guardian letters page, mostly on the subject of smoking. In his early days at the Royal College of Art, he used his paintings as propaganda for vegetarianism, his fellow student Ron Kitaj having advised him to stick to subjects he cared about. Between experiments in abstract expressionism on one hand and meticulously drawn skeletons on the other, he began to explore his homosexuality. He'd been aware of it since his Boy Scout days but London allowed it more expression. A crush on Cliff Richard (hard to fathom in retrospect but forgivable at the time) produced a painting called Doll Boy; allusions to Whitman were the subtext in others. A first visit to New York added to his sense of freedom. He came back with bleached hair, white shoes and a taste for cigars.

A solid northern work ethic underpinned the flamboyance. "GET UP AND WORK IMMEDIATELY" he painted on the chest of drawers by his bed, and at college he arrived early and stayed late, so as not to be distracted by fellow students. He was the college's "Number 1 Character" its registrar said, a student whose paintings were already selling and winning prizes. And yet he almost didn't graduate. A 6,000-word thesis was required as well as art work, and Hockney's hurriedly composed thesis on Fauvism didn't satisfy the examiners. He professed not to care, having already been signed up by a dealer, Kasmin. To spare itself embarrassment, the college appointed a sub-committee, including Carel Weight , to "recount" the original marks so that Hockney could have his diploma. "He is being given a GOLD MEDAL & has a FIRST CLASS HONOURS", his proud mother Laura wrote in her diary.

Laura's diary entries are one of the great pleasures of the book. It's clear she doesn't know much about, or doesn't much want to know about, her son's sex life, drug-taking, poker games, and so on. But her delight in his success is touching, and her dismay at his domestic arrangements whenever she visits becomes a sort of running gag: "a divan bed but no sheets", "flat beautifully decorated, unfortunately heater not fixed in lounge". The book almost merits a plural title: all the Hockneys, siblings as well as parents, play a part.

From London, Hockney moved on to Los Angeles. His grumpy departure from a country where the pubs closed at 11 and the telly shut down at midnight made headline news in 1966, but in effect he'd left two years previously, learning to drive, buying a car, finding a studio and starting to paint within a week of arrival. The California years have been better documented than the early years, not just because Hockney's swimming-pool paintings made him internationally famous, but thanks to Jack Hazan's film A Bigger Splash. The making of the film is a fascinating story in its own right: rather than creating a documentary about Hockney's art, Hazan focused on the break-up of his five-year relationship with his young lover, Peter Schlesinger. Watching it, a distressed Hockney felt doubly betrayed – it was painful enough that Schlesinger had left him, but then he'd gone and colluded with Hazan.

A close friendship with Celia Birtwell, which nearly became more than friendship, was one consolation. And it was followed by another serious romance, with Gregory Evans. Other dalliances occur, but mostly offstage, between the lines. The book isn't prurient and the break-up with Schlesinger is the only real trauma. There are fallings-out, outbursts of impatience, artistic failures and days only got through with Valium. But Hockney mostly seems to be enjoying himself – even the battle with British customs after they confiscate the male flesh mags he has brought from California ends in triumph. Overall it remains a happy life. A hard-working and dutiful one, too, despite the bohemian trimmings: here's a man who always sends roses on his mother's birthday. "A Rake's Progress" it says below Hockney's name on the front cover. But on the evidence of this book, there's nothing rakish about him.

Christopher Simon Sykes first met his subject in the 1960s: their backgrounds were worlds apart (Sykes went to Eton) but they shared a love of east Yorkshire, where Hockney has spent much of the past few years. It's a chatty, knowledgeable, insider's biography, full of anecdotes, not all of them about Hockney. (I enjoyed the story of the southern socialite pointing out a thin girl in a bikini to Tennessee Williams – "Look, anorexia nervosa" – and him replying "Oh, Marguerite, you know everyone.") The drawback is that we end with the subject still in his 30s, with half his career still to come. Of course it makes sense for the publisher to get out a part-biography now, to coincide with the forthcoming Hockney show at the Royal Academy. But for the reader it's frustrating. Martin Gayford's recent book A Bigger Message (Thames & Hudson, £18.95) has a narrower remit – a set of conversations with Hockney over the past 10 years – but it's a better guide to what he is up to today.

What comes over in both these books is Hockney's openness to new methods and technologies. In LA in the 1960s, he excitedly discovered the possibilities of acrylic paint. Later it was the camera. These days it's the iPad and iPhone. The letter-writer railing against the nanny state can sound crusty and out of touch. But the artist is endlessly self-renewing.

David Hockney, Man in a Museum (Or You're In the Wrong Movie), 1962
Looking at alternate styles – cubist, abstract expressionist or realist – Hockney's title and similar works make a joke of the options facing a young artist. Here he foregrounds his own attraction to the flatness of Egyptian art as a way of avoiding linear perspective. Hockney's breakthrough came when he began following RB Kitaj's advice and brought his personal interests into his pictures, which at the time included children's art, graffiti and film. Photograph: British Council Collection / David Hockne

David Hockney, The Room Tarzana, 1967
This is one of Hockney's iconic Californian interiors. His reclining figure is painted so carefully and affectionately, but the image becomes more strange and daring as you consider the odd perspective of the furniture, the hardened folds of the bedcover and the glimpse of brilliant turquoise in the bright sky. Photograph: David Hockney

A Bigger Splash, 1967.

David Hockney: the East Riding tourist trail starts here

Artist collaborates with Yorkshire tourist board to link sites of his recent paintings. But Brid may not be included, to safeguard his privacy


Come and see the real thing: David Hockney's Woldgate Woods. Photograph: Tate Britain/PA

David Hockney, the godfather of modern British art, is about to start work in a new medium that he has been famously dismissive of in the past. Tourism.

Bridlington-based Hockney is in the process of creating an official tourist trail to a number of sites across his home county of Yorkshire, with a particular focus on those places he has painted in the East Riding's Yorkshire Wolds as part of the Royal Academy exhibition which opens in January.

The move represents a change of heart by Hockney who has been reluctant to promote Yorkshire in the past as he famously does not like crowds of people. This is one of the reasons he settled in Los Angeles, because of the lack of the celebrity-chasing that he experienced in Britain and then Paris in the 1970s.

Even at the press conference to launch next year's Royal Academy exhibition he expressed concern that his paintings might result in an influx of people to the Wolds altering its atmosphere and appeal, especially to him.

However, he is a pragmatist too and he recognises that the David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture exhibition will put the Yorkshire Wolds on the global map for artists as well as tourists as the bulk of the landscape and film works being exhibited were done in this quiet corner of East Yorkshire.

It is already being talked about as Hockney Country in the art world, just as Suffolk is recognised as Constable Country.

So Britain's most popular living artist has agreed to work with the county's tourist board, Welcome to Yorkshire, to create an official tourist trail, rather than allow unofficial versions or websites to identify incorrectly the sites at which he has worked.

It is not yet known whether he will actively promote the trail himself or just lend his name and copyright to it.


David Hockney at the Tate Britain in London with Bigger Trees near Water (2007) which he has given to Tate Britain. Photograph: Heathcliff O'Malley/Rex Features

Sites likely to be featured would include the village of Warter where he painted Bigger Trees (which were subsequently chopped down) and Bigger Trees Near Warter (which still exist). Although it will not be part of the Royal Academy exhibition, Bigger Trees remains one of his most famous works from the Wolds, a giant painting made up of 50 canvases measuring 40 feet in width.

Other areas pencilled-in would be Garrowby Hill and Sledmere, both of which inspired re-imagined workings of the landscapes he knows so well, rather than ones painted in the open air such as those at Warter.

The steep valley village of Thixendale, where he has painted Three Trees through the Seasons might also be on the trail, as well as Woldgate Woods, outside the village of Kilham, both of which have a role in the coming exhibition.

However, Bridlington, where he now spends most of his time rather than in Los Angeles, is less likely to be featured, just in case the trail inspires Hockney Hunters intent on finding the ultimate spot on the Hockney Trail. His studio.

Winter Timber by David Hockney.

eddie wrote:
A Bigger Splash, 1967.

Peter Duggan's Artoons.

Peter Duggan's Artoons.

David Hockney's present exhibition at the Royal Academy, London:


A Closer Winter Tunnel, Feb-Mar, 2006. Photograph: David Hockney / Art Gallery of New South Wales

Under the Trees, Bigger, 2010-11. Photograph: David Hockney

Winter Timber, 2009. Photograph: David Hockney

7 November 11.30am & 26 November 9.30am 2010, Woldgate Woods, East Yorkshire. Film still. Photograph: David Hockney

Nichols Canyon, California, 1980. Photograph: David Hockney