David Hockney's hi-tech high art

Associated media

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

Martin Gayford

‘Technology is allowing us to do all kinds of things today, but I don’t think anybody has thought that it could help painting’, David Hockney tells Martin Gayford.

The most striking thing about Hockney’s recent projects is their scale. Bigger  Trees near Warter [sic] or / Peinture sur le motif pour le Nouvel Age Post-Photographique, covered the end wall of the largest gallery in the Royal Academy’s 2007 summer exhibition.  The painting is made up of 50 oil painted squares, measuring in total 180 x 480cm.  It illustrates Hockney’s experimentation with the depiction of space.  While he has resorted to some elements of traditional perspective, it is the structure of the trees that creates the sense of space. It is probably the largest landscape painting ever produced, certainly the first of this size painted entirely out of doors, but it has been made possible only with digital technology.

As strong as Hockney’s fascination with trees, perspective and light is, this is his more recent passion: the iPhone and the iPad as media for art.  Gayford recalls meeting Hockney one spring day in 2009 when he had his first iPhone.  He soon learned to draw on it and from then on, daily greetings, often in the form of flower pictures, would drop into the inboxes of his friends.  Hockney makes it look easy, but admits it took quite a while to master.  When the iPad was announced in January 2010, it was only a matter of a few months before Hockney was drawing on one.  He admits he loves it, adding, ‘Picasso would have gone mad with this. I don’t know an artist who wouldn’t, actually’.  Because it is eight times bigger than the iPhone, almost like a medium-sized sketchbook, it is easier to draw on.  Now he doesn’t just draw with his thumb, but with all his fingers and a stylus.  He carries one around in a special pocket (he has such a pocket in all his suits) and uses it like a sketchbook. 

When in 2006, Hockney returned to his native Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast after two decades in Los Angeles, he took over a house his mother and sister used to live in.  He had begun painting Yorkshire landscapes in the late 1990s, planning to return to Los Angeles, but he became fascinated with the ever-changing light in Yorkshire.  Now he is regularly to be seen painting in the open around Bridlington, catching the different light effects from dawn to dusk.  As he says, ‘I am incredibly daylight-conscious and light-conscious generally.  That’s why I always wear hats to minimize the dazzle and glare’. 

While Hockney paints in the open, the canvases are completed in the studio. He has a studio at the top of the house, but has recently had to rent a large warehouse on the outskirts of town where he and a team of assistants work on the huge paintings he is producing for the forthcoming  exhibition at the Royal Academy. ‘Perhaps, today to make big statements with paintings, you have to paint them big’, Hockney replies, when asked by Gayford whether the size of the gallery dictates the size of his paintings.  Although slightly daunted at the scale of this project, Hockney finds the challenge energizing, remarking: ‘I would never have expected to be painting with such ambition at my age’.  He turned 74 in July.

Written in elegant, simple prose and beautifully illustrated, the book takes the form of conversations between David Hockney and Martin Gayford, an art critic, linked with informative essays. Throughout the book, Gayford gently prompts Hockney, an easy communicator, who clearly enjoys explaining his views on painting, drawing and photography, his love affair with digital technology and last but not least, his love of trees.  He is deeply interested in the work of earlier artists and makes frequent references to those he admires the most. The book’s index divides the conversations into different subject areas, but the thread that runs throughout, is the output of the past five years: the huge Yorkshire tree paintings of vivid clarity and colour and the more recent ravishing and inventive small iPhone and iPad paintings.

Gayford deftly links conversations about current projects with relevant examples of the artist’s earlier work, but it is Hockney’s voice that speaks here and it is full of fascinating information and insights.  One of the more revealing admissions in the book, is that he is ‘greedy for an exciting life’, adding ‘on the other hand, I can find excitement, I admit, in raindrops falling on a puddle’.  This is the mature Hockney, who still wants life to be exciting, but for whom that desire can be satisfied by looking at exquisite details in nature.  Looking is essential and drawing teaches us to look, he insists.  He is a colourist, but he has never compromised his belief in an art based on drawing.  Hockney emerges from this book as a hugely gifted artist and a deeply thoughtful person, whose intellectual curiosity has continued to drive him on to inventive uses of new technologies in his quest to depict the world around him.

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayfordis published by Thames & Hudson, 2011. 240 pp. 154 colour/7 mono illus.ISBN 978-0-500-23887-5