Hockney
David Hockney was born in 1937 in Bradford in the north of the United Kingdom. Being an important contributor to the Pop Art movement, he is generally considered one of the most influential living artists. International success for the last 50 years has been the result. The range and power of his work has been acknowledged universally; at any given time there is a David Hockney exhibition taking place somewhere in the world.
David Hockney enjoys the making of prints / editions since the beginning of his career. In David Hockney's scheme, there is no medium inherently superior to any other. His prints / editions are as a result not made as a way of reproducing his creation in a cheaper form, but as the most appropriate vehicle for exploring ideas and subjects. His graphic work exists of a large number of etchings, lithographs, aquatints, screenprints, home made prints executed on an office colour copy machine, digital inkjet prints, photographs.
As regards to style, Hockney's graphic work not surprisingly corresponds with the themes in his paintings. The central theme of his paintings and prints is space: from the intimate close-up views of his early nude boys over his swimming pools to the broad panorama views of the Grand Canyon, executed in the late nineties. As with all great artists, certain images have become iconic: swimming pools, dogs, boys in showers, portraits and luminous still lifes.
An overview of Hockney's prints / editions can be found in 2 catalogues:
1. David Hockney prints 1954 - 77 published by the Midland Group and the Scottish Arts Council (prints overview for the period 1954 through 1977).
2. David Hockney prints 1954 - 1995 published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Japan (prints overview for the period 1954 through 1995).
Works from Hockney
ARTICLES ON DAVID HOCKNEY
David Hockney: portrait of the old master
He is one of the most influential British artists of the past half-century and, at 72, finds he is busier than ever. On the eve of a major new retrospective, David Hockney talks about the romance of nature, the benefits of going deaf and his part in the 2012 Olympics.
Over the summer, David Hockney has been lying in his bed in Bridlington, East Yorkshire's answer to Malibu, and trying to capture the sun rising over the bay on his iPhone. He uses an application called Brushes, and his thumb. When he's finished a drawing, he'll send it to 20 or so friends, straight off, by email. On good days each of his friends has been getting half a dozen original works by Britain's best-loved artist well before breakfast. Were they suitably appreciative, I wonder. "Well, I think so", says Hockney, whose accent seems even more lived-in since his return to his home county. "Somone said that if they see an email from me they know they don't have to answer it, it's a bit of pure pleasure and it's free. So that's all right, I suppose." He's stopped now, he says, because he can no longer see the autumn sun from his bedroom window, and "I'd have to get up and cross the road to do them, which wouldn't be quite the same".
If this sounds like retirement - sketching pink skies on a lie-in what was once a seafront guest house - don't be fooled. At 72, Hockney finds himself busier than ever. He has a show of his epic landscape paintings just about to debut in New York, a major retrospective that will open the new Nottingham Contemporary gallery next month, and he is already preparing for the most ambitious exhibition of his life in 2012, when the Royal Academy has invited him to fill the entire gallery for the Olympic year. "It keeps me young," Hockney says of the challenge. Visitors to Bridlington routinely find themselves abruptly woken before dawn to accompany him to look at the way first light is falling on a particular stand of trees, the obsession of his recent work.
The iPhone drawings are explained as another of the artist's familiar diversions - following on from his sometimes brilliant experiments with faxes, photocopies and Polaroids - all part of his restless need to find new ways of looking and drawing (his Desert Island Discs luxury was an electric pencil sharpener). Neighbours in Bridlington, he says, stop him from time to time in the high street to suggest that they have heard he has taken to drawing on his telephone; no, he says, it's just that he occasionally speaks into his sketch pad.
I met up with Hockney in the studio in Kensington that he has had since the early 70s. He doesn't work here much - it doesn't have the attractions for him of Bridlington or Beverly hills, between which he divides his time - but the room is filled with pinned-up drawings and paintings. He tucks into apple cake and tea, sets a packet of Camels next to him and talks, to begin with, about his unlikely homecoming.
He once said that he emigrated to California in the 60s because it offered "sun, sea and sex". Though Bridlington can traditionally only guarantee one of these opportunities, he advertises the resort with comparable excitement.
He came back first when his mother was getting older - she died 10 years ago at 99 - and he bought the house in which he now lives for her to share with his sister, a herbalist. He had a studio in the attic, and on visits from the States he began painting some of the landscapes he had known from his childhood.
Hockney grew up in Bradford, but he worked over near the coast in the summers on a farm "just stooking corn, and I used to cycle all round there". Not much has changed. "It's just like the 50s really," he says. "West Yorkshire is crowded with cars, but out where we are you can drive for hours and not see another soul."
He used to take his mother out on some of these drives, along lanes, seeing where they would end up, and he discovered something in the landscape that has become his subject. Late Hockney, maybe. It was to do with the seasons, which he missed in California, a sense of circularity and return - and mortality. After his mother died - "she was in bed only the last three days of her life, and surrounded by four of her five children, so very blessed in a way" - he hadn't really imagined he would want to come back so often, but "it just happened".
"I suddenly saw that there was a bigger thing for me to do here," he says "as a painter. And it was a great place to do it. It was difficult to get to from London - you can't go for a day - so I wouldn't be interrupted. That's what I want at my time in life, to be honest. You can work outside and no one bothers you. People smile at you in the street. It wouldn't suit everyone, I suppose," he says, "but it suits us."
Hockney shares his house with his partner of 20 years, John Fitzherbert, and his assistant Jean - Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, a sometime accordion player. "Jean - Pierre," he suggests, "is perhaps the only Parisian who has traded his city for Bridlington. He is fascinated by it all. It's not very prosperous; people just shuffle around, but they are aware that it is a very rare place. We are very aware of that, too."
After he so vividly escaped some of the narrowness of his postwar childhood - in search of the golden lads and desert air of the West Coast - it's fascinating to see Hockney now so amused by his rootedness. A local historian has recently informed him that the Hockneys nearly all originally came from East Yorkshire and north Lincolnshire, where they were agricultural labourers of one sort or another. "He told me that they would have been looking at the hawthorn I had been painting, too, but to them it would have been something quite different - a hedgerow, I suppose."
Part of Hockney's desire for comparative solitude lies in the hereditary deafness that he's struggled with for the past 30 years. Digital hearing aids allow him to follow one-on-one conversations, but in a restaurant he's lost. As viewers of the 1974 film A Bigger Splash will know, Hockney got his fair share of partying in early, and he is a man with a keen and modest sense of his own good fortune: "It's no good saying I wished I could go out more, because I can't," he says with a grin. "But I don't bother about it too much." He's currently deep into reading a biography of Somerset Maugham, particularly for its revelations about Maugham's relationship with the director George Cukor, an old friend of Hockney's "who had rather a liking for bad boys, which I always enjoyed". As he recalls this history, you can see in him, suddenly, the Royal College of Art student who once took to the stage in miners' boots at a Christmas revue to sing: "I'm just a girl who can't say no", but these days he says he's happy enough taking a walk on the promenade, for a smoke.
His deafness has other compensations. He believes it has changed the way he perceives space and given him a sharper sense of light and shade. "I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music," he says, "he was tone deaf. But then he had this incredible grasp of tone in drawing, of chiaroscuro. He may not have been able to hear them, but he could see more tones than almost anyone who has lived."
Picasso remains a touchstone for Hockney, particularly the late work, which as he gets older he sees ever more clearly. "I went in 1973 to see the original show of his late paintings in Avignon," he recalls. "I went with Douglas Cooper, who was quite a Picasso scholar. He was telling me how terrible the paintings were, but I said I would like to go all the same. So we went over there and Douglas is going on and on about how poor the work is. And eventually I said: "Do you mind if I just have a look for a while?" So I looked around for a bit. And I went back to douglas , and I said: "You may not be interested, but these are paintings about being an old man." There was a painting of an old guy, his legs crooked, his balls on the floor, a woman trying to hold him up. I said these are the themes only the greatest take on: Rembrandt, Van Gogh. You wouldn't get it in Andy Warhol."
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Does he feel he has become more like his father as he has become older, I wonder.
"I can certainly see the sense in him a bit more," he suggests. "He was very eccentric. One time I came home at night and he was sat halfway down the street in one of our armchairs out of the front room, outside a phone box. I said: "Well, what are you doing?" He said: "I put an ad in the paper to sell the billiard table and told people to ring this number between six and six thirty." At 6.30 pm he wheeled the chair back up the street. It's important to be comfortable, though, isn't it?"
One of the great things about Hockney in California was that for all his freedom, creative energy and bleached-blond fame, a bit of him never forgot to see LA through Bradford eyes. He tells a story about his mother coming to stay with him for the first time, after his father died, when she was in her sixties. After two or three days, she said: "It's strange - all this lovely weather and yet you never see any washing out."
He prides himself in comparable Wallace and Gromit common sense. "When I'm in LA," he confides at one point, "I always keep a pair of slippers by the bed, because I heard once that the only way you get hurt in an earthquake is from cut glass on the floor. And I've got a manual override on the garage door. The last big earthquake they had, Beverley Hills was without electricity for a day, and no one could get their cars out of the garage - except me." In his car he always keeps his emergency supplies: "a bottle of water and a carton of cigarettes".
He misses the road trips most. "I grew to love the desert," he says. "The people who live there are independent and mad. I remember driving through it playing Handel's Messiah, loud, and thinking: "This music is great in the desert." But then of course all religions have been born in the desert. Some bloke sitting on the bare surface of the earth contemplating the cosmos."
Hockney was raised a Methodist but gave it up long ago. "I'm not anti-religious though," he says; "In fact I think we are going to pay a heavy price for the decline of it. It's why the green movement has taken off, I think. It's a quasi-religion, it seems to me. That the apocalypse will all be down to our bad conduct, our bad behaviour. When I hear that I think: "Here we go again."
His paintings, particularly his tree paintings - some of them 40ft across, made up of a series of portable smaller canvases that he can work on outdoors - look like the best kind of out-of-body experiences, I suggest, a form of meditation. What is he thinking when he sitting in those Yorkshire woods?
"When you really look at nature like I have been doing," he says, "I mean really look, then you quickly realise we are just insects, stupid little creatures. And you do get a bit of humidity. They chopped down some of the trees I had been drawing. I was angry at first, but you then realise that you have another subject: is it dead, is it not? The wood is always alive if you look."
He always seemed an eternal summer artist. Which season does he favour now?
"These days," he says, "I find that at the end of one season you are very much ready for the next. Part of it has to do with timing. In the winter in Bridlington you only have seven hours a day to paint, but in the summer you have 18 hours."
One of his excusrsions recently took him right to the far tip of Norway, where it never got dark. "There's a place where you can watch the sun at midnight that is like the edge of the world. You go up there in this mist and all these people are walking silently up there."
Sounds apocalyptic?
"Well, the food isn't so good."
While he was in Norway he went to see an Edvard Much painting of the sunrise in Oslo. Typically he was fascinated by the mechanics of it. "He'd got lines in it that cameras could never see, but we could - and of course in Oslo in June, Munch could look at the sun for a lot longer than Van Gogh could at Arles."
Or even Hockney in Bridlington. He says he is planning to paint a 'very big' sunrise for the Royal Academy show - the iPhone pictures are part of his feeling his way toward that. There has always been a bit of high-level schmaltz about Hockney - he's long had a soft spot for the romanticism of Casper David Friedrich - but does he approach his new dawn with a bit of trepidation?
"I'm well aware that most pictures of sunrises are clichés, but I'm also aware that a sunrise is never a cliché in nature," he says. "So that's the challenge."
How much does that effort feel like a rage against the dying of the light, I wonder.
Hockney grins. "Actually, I think I have more energy now than I did 10 years ago," he says. "I'll always run up the stairs, especially for a cigarette."
Source: The Observer, Sunday 1 November 2009