Welcome to Great Art.
For the past few years, we've been filming
the biggest exhibitions in the world
about some of the greatest artists and art in history.
Not only did we record these landmark shows
but we also gained privileged access behind the scenes
of the galleries and museums concerned.
We then used the exhibitions as a springboard
to take a broader look.
In 2012, David Hockney, arguably Britain's favourite artist...
In fact, there isn't much of an argument there.
Anyway, he staged an exhibition here
at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.
Entitled A Bigger Picture, it was devoted entirely to landscape
and proved to be extraordinarily popular.
We filmed that show, but then waited until his next at the RA in 2016,
which centred on portraiture with a little nod to still life, too.
The two exhibitions brought in over 750,000 people,
emphatically showing the appeal of an artist now into his ninth decade
but showing few signs of losing his creative enthusiasm.
Not only were we able to film these extraordinary shows,
we were also able to interview David Hockney
on both occasions in London and in his studio in LA.
Our aim was to see if we could find out a little more
about one of the most compelling artists in the world.
(INAUDIBLE)
David Hockney is one of several artists
who emerged in Britain after the Second World War
who took British art back up, I suppose, to a very high level,
a level which it had been in the early 19th century
with Turner and Constable.
But after the second World War, with the advent of Francis Bacon,
Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, David, some others,
it went back to that very high level.
And also, they collectively did something
which, according to some art critics and historians,
wasn't supposed to happen,
which is that they put figurative art back centre stage.
I think David Hockney is a quintessential British artist,
and he's one of the great British artists
because he's got these very British attitudes to painting,
that he paints what he sees. He calls it eyeballing.
He likes to eyeball a person or a landscape,
and he's also... He's very interested in the history of art himself.
He's very interested in theories of art
and he's very aware of photography,
and he's speculated on the connections and the differences
between painting and photography -
how does a painting resemble a photograph
or how is it different from a photograph?
And the conclusions he seems to have come to at the moment
is that painting and drawing, it's about hand, heart and mind.
It's about looking and seeing and also feeling
and bringing all of that together in a way that you can only do
by making a painting or a drawing,
that you can't do if you just click a camera.
There's that kind of simple honesty and bravery
and, actually, an experimental quality
that is to do with the nature of looking,
all of which keeps his art fresh and keeps it good and important.
The Royal Academy has a special relationship with David Hockney.
He was elected a Royal Academician in 1991
and has exhibited his work here regularly ever since.
Edith Devaney is one of the senior curators at the Academy
who's worked with Hockney over many years
and has overseen both his major exhibitions here.
In my role as contemporary curator,
I am working a lot with living artists,
and that's a very particular role in itself.
And the ability to keep in touch with artists
that you've worked with in the past,
to get to know new artists to see what's happening
is absolutely critical.
There's also that thing that's very hard to define,
and it's looking for the right moment for things.
David's shows came about a little bit like that,
but it was also because I knew him quite well.
And I worked with him on a big work
for that year's summer exhibition in 2007,
where he wanted to take up one of the end walls,
and that was all to do with landscape.
And, of course, by that stage, he'd returned to Yorkshire
and he was doing quite a considerable number of works
focused on the Yorkshire landscape.
And having the conversations with him
around the production of that landscape
made me think, "There's something more here,
there's something that he hasn't completely tapped into."
And I think his instinct is to explore this whole genre more
and there's more to come.
When I put it to him that, actually, we could do this show,
filling the main galleries, just of Yorkshire landscapes,
he loved the challenge and it took him about 12 hours to agree to it.
And he was surprised and completely delighted
and it became this wonderful journey that we went on together.
TIM: David, the exhibition seems set up as a kind of journey
through your engagement with landscape painting.
Do you remember the circumstances in which you painted
those two very early ones in Bradford?
A little bit. Erm...
One reason that I pointed out, they're the darkest paintings in here
because they were done with cheap paint,
a very cheap flake white, and it goes dark.
I was at the arts school in Bradford
and they were painting out en plein air.
I did paint a few pictures of Bradford's streets.
But in those days, you were always kind of trying
to avoid LS Lowry a bit, a little bit.
They seem quite oppressive.
I'm fascinated by the fact it's to do with the cheap paint.
But did you feel, at that stage, that Yorkshire and West Yorkshire
and Bradford were quite gloomy places?
Well, I did think that, yes.
I mean, I've pointed out, you know, I love the cinema
and I've always noticed
the strong shadows in California in films,
and you don't get those in Bradford. And, er, yeah, I mean,
I knew there was a big wide world somewhere else
and frankly, I was gonna go there and look at it, yeah, I was.
So you travelled, and again, in the exhibition,
we see the earliest results of your travels.
There's an extraordinary painting which is called The Flight to Italy,
but it's also subtitled a Swiss Landscape.
What was that? Was that your Grand Tour?
Well, it was, er,
I think, only the second time I'd been on the Continent,
and someone offered me and my American friend
a lift to Bern in Switzerland in the back of a minivan.
Well, if you haven't much money, you take this, of course, and don't mind.
But, of course, I couldn't see anything.
And I thought it was quite amusing,
you know, driving through very spectacular Alps,
and I didn't really see them for the first time,
but you could make a painting of it somehow.
The style of that painting is... In some ways, it's highly original,
and in other ways, one can refer to what was happening in British
and international art at the beginning of the '60s.
I think Marco Livingstone, in the catalogue,
says there's a nice nod to Harold Cohen in the abstract lines.
Yeah. I mean, remember, this was a time
when abstract painting was dominant, very, very dominant,
and any kind of representational painting
was seen as a little bit reactionary or something.
But, I mean, I always thought
that was a bit of a mad view of things, I did,
erm, so you slightly could mock it a little bit.
Was landscape a taboo subject?
Were you conscious of it being a taboo subject then?
Er, yes, it was, when I look back.
And in a way, I didn't have too much interest in it
until I went, in a way, perhaps, to Egypt.
When I went to Egypt, which was 1963,
was the first place I'd been ever and I just drew it.
I didn't take a camera or anything. I just took pencil and paper.
And then not long afterwards, I went to California,
where, also, I reacted to the place I was.
I actually began painting Los Angeles.
I had never really painted London.
I mean, I do react to the places.
I mean, I react to the spaces I'm in as well. I do.
From then on - that was the '60s - I keep going back to landscape.
I keep going back to portraits as well.
My mother died in 1999.
She was 99, and I began to...
Then my sister was in the hospital, so I kept staying.
And then...I'd go back to LA,
but then a friend of mine died in LA
that was someone very, very close. I spent most of my evenings with him.
And I just suddenly thought, "Well, I'll go back to England for a while.
I don't know what to do here." And I did.
And I went up to Yorkshire just to be quiet...
Thinking it'd be quieter staying with my sister.
And then I simply began to drive around,
looking at the landscape, and realised it's very special, the landscapes. Lovely, actually.
And I began by just...
I thought, "Well, maybe I'll just go out and sit and...
sit and look at it and find a way to make marks,
make a language, find a language for it."
And when you're taking things outside, to paint outside,
then you start having problems if they get bigger.
Wind, rain, things, you know.
And the landscapes seemed big to me
and so I wanted to make them bigger still.
And the reason we devised this method was
it was the only method...
There was a limit to the size of the canvas
I could get in the studio in Bridlington because of the stairs.
So, you know, if you didn't want to re-stretch, there's a limit.
So I thought, "Well, if you just put two or three together,
you've got a bigger canvas, so you can do it like that."
You have to keep a lot in your head, of course.
I mean, it was...
But it was an exciting thing to be doing, I thought.
Then I did move into a very large studio in Bridlington.
We were...We were actually just looking for a storage space at first
but we found a place, I mean, five minutes from the house
that was marvellously enormous, I mean, really big,
and I realised there's this marvellous even light over this massive room.
Do you try, almost always, to paint using daylight,
so you're replicating the experience of being outside?
I do. I mean, I prefer the daylight.
I'm a day person, me. I'm not a night person.
I go to bed quite early. I get up early cos I like the light.
And in May and June in Britain, I'll be up at 6:00
because the light is superb then because you're on the east coast.
Most people will never see the wolds lit wonderfully,
and the best time is, say, May and June about 6:00 in the morning.
What are the fundamental differences between oil paintings
that you realise in the studio
and the watercolours and oil paintings that you realise
en plein air in situ?
Well, I mean, the ones en plein air
are based on you observing and reacting to,
basically, what's in front of you.
I said I felt I needed to do that for a while,
to look hard, to look hard at it
and devise methods for dealing with it,
mark-making and so on.
Whereas in the big studio,
I mean, you start then using different aspects of this.
I would use memory, for instance.
Once I got in the big studio and I was planning bigger pictures,
I would often go out with a chair and pick places and sit and look.
And knowing you're going back to work
from the memory you are dealing with now,
then start asking questions.
"What do I see first?
Does the bark of the tree dominate to me?
Does that attract my eye? Does...?"
Because there's so much to look at, really.
I mean, I think it's Bonheur said
he couldn't paint outside because it was too confusing.
I mean, I know what he means in a way. There is... You have to edit it.
Visual distraction everywhere. Yeah, painting is editing.
And there came a time when, in a way, I virtually stopped
going out to draw and paint, then, and I was doing it in the studio.
Does this work...? Does the oil painting
feel like the culmination,
or is it just as much a part of the process...
as part of the work as the individual prints are?
Well, I mean, I think the prints actually influence this painting.
Meaning the marks, now, are a bit different
because the iPad has intervened.
So the marks being made here I began to use in there.
But the marks are very visible in these,
meaning it's like painting.
I'm deliberately... aware to leave the marks behind.
And I'd always, then, planned a very big painting,
and this is big enough for the wall.
So in a way, you could say this work is site-specific.
Oh, this... It's site-specific to the landscape,
but it's specific also, in your mind, to this space.
Yeah, this was made for this room.
If you want to depict something that's an action in nature,
which spring is...
Though winter isn't necessarily an action.
Winter is there for two months. It doesn't change much.
Spring and autumn are actions, in a way,
that events happen and it changes things.
So, I became aware I wanted to deal with this.
So, when the Royal Academy asked me, for instance...
I think they first suggested
the exhibition would be in January 2011.
And I thought about it and I suggested,
"No, January 2012 would be better,"
because I need so many springs. I think four, I said.
And I wished to observe them more carefully
to deal with how to do one, you see.
Did you see that always, from the beginning,
as a single work, a single installation?
Not quite from the beginning, but soon after.
The thing was they had some snow.
So, I go out to draw the snow in the car and on an iPad,
because I'm just in the car.
And I did two or three, the first two or three,
and we printed them outside and I pinned them up
and then I kept looking and thinking,
"Oh, my God, you could use an iPad. You could do it.
It's a very good technique.
I could develop these techniques to show the changes in the road."
So it was only about mid-January, about one year ago now
that I then realised, "Yes, the whole room could be this."
I worked out how many approximately
and then realised, "Well, if I begin now..."
Originally, I was going to begin in April, when the activity really begins,
but then I realised, put the winter there first,
so you understand how big the change is.
And because it's gradual, you know, most people don't notice.
You have to be looking carefully to follow it.
It's a very good job to observe the arrival of spring.
Most people don't have it as a job, do they, professionally?
But if you do, it's a very,
very wonderful experience actually doing it.
What does an iPad give you
that working, say, in watercolour or using a sketchbook doesn't?
Well, it's a new medium, so there's gains and losses.
It is a new medium, but the great gain is speed.
You've got all the colour, textures, all there in your hands.
So, any draughtsman is interested in speed. It means speed of drawing.
Sometimes drawing fast, you draw...
You're aware that Rembrandt drew fast.
And you're aware that often, drawing fast,
you might sacrifice accuracy but you gain something else.
What you miss... What do you miss?
You miss resistance which paper has.
Here, it is incredibly smooth.
In a way, you're drawing on glass, I suppose,
but the range of marks you can make is enormous.
But I had become aware that I'd done, maybe, 300 drawings
but you could only see them one by one on an iPad.
And then I realised to see them all,
you've got to just have a traditional exhibition.
How will you see 30 and compare them?
I thought that was amusing, you know.
I thought, "Well, yes, how do you exhibit these things?"
Hockney's Yorkshire landscapes are very varied, I think.
They're varied in quality,
they're varied in what they're trying to do.
It was, kind of, an experiment in making art.
I mean, it was a strange and brave thing for Hockney,
who had made his home so successfully in the United States,
to return to Yorkshire,
to return to the landscapes of his youth.
John Constable said that he painted the landscapes of his youth.
Hockney's made a life not of painting the landscapes of his youth
but painting other landscapes, other places.
He goes back to Yorkshire and also goes back
to a Impressionist, 19th-century way of painting.
The way that Constable painted, the way that Monet painted -
in other words, standing in the open air,
trying to paint the motif in nature directly from observation.
And the exhibition that eventually resulted,
this huge exhibition at the Royal Academy,
it was a fascinating exhibition
in which David Hockney explored the idea
that you can still paint nature and paint from nature
and paint landscapes in the way that Monet painted them
or Constable painted them, that you can still do that today
and it'd still be an important and moving art.
I think it was a partial success in those terms.
But it was a total success as a experiment
and as an example of an artist who doesn't rest on his laurels.
After finishing his immersion in his native Yorkshire landscape,
Hockney returned to Los Angeles in 2012,
and for a time, he wasn't sure what it was he wanted to paint.
But eventually he turned his attentions to another genre,
that of portraiture.
And four years later, another extraordinary exhibition at the Royal Academy
of 82 portraits and a still life,
all in the same format, four by three,
with each of the sitters,
be they friends, artists, people who were visiting the studio,
painted over a period of three days, 22 hours.
When the time had elapsed, that was it.
Hockney finished, took a couple of days' break
and then started again.
And in a way, each of the works bears scrutiny,
but actually, it's one single work of art, ultimately.
EDITH: The landscape show was one of the biggest things he's ever done.
Even he says that across his career
it was the biggest challenge he was ever set
by an institution before, to create that volume of work.
And what's interesting for us is having, I guess, exhausted
the idea of looking at the landscape
and challenging our perception of the landscape,
he goes from that great expanse to the intimacy of the portrait.
He'd got used to sending me images
of all the works that he was creating,
so we kept in touch that way on a very, very regular basis.
After a while, this incredible portrait came through
of Jean-Pierre with his head in his hands,
and David's subject was,
"This is a portrait of Jean-Pierre but it could be a self-portrait."
And it was just an enormously, kind of, poignant...
And we could see the link to Van Gogh's Old Man In Sorrow,
and it was just such a remarkable work.
And then, slowly but becoming increasingly regular,
other portraits emerged.
DAVID: Painted portraits are different from photographed portraits.
These are painted portraits. I just paint them.
It took me a little while to get into it,
er, because...
I did some portraits first,
just having somebody sit.
I did two or three and then I thought about it
and I thought, "Well, I need the feet in, I think."
So in the end, I got them on a platform.
And I did the first one
and the feet just came off the bottom.
And so, I did another one with Gregory
and put the feet in, but the chair was wrong then.
That chair...at the side, you wouldn't see the figure in it.
And so I quickly got to a simpler chair.
I did about five or six portraits
quite quickly.
I mean, each one took three days.
And I'd realised
if you ask somebody to sit for a portrait, which I did,
how long can they sit there?
I mean... And I thought,
"Well, three days. I could ask people to give me three days,
and a portrait would be made in three days."
I'm painting all the time
and the third day is slower.
The quickest painting is when you start.
But when you're finishing, the third day,
I'm... You know, you're just putting on a few marks, a few strokes,
and so it's slower,
what you're doing, and deciding what you do.
But I have done them in three days.
I mean, I think you can paint a portrait in three days.
I mean, you can paint a portrait in an hour, actually.
I'd got it going by about the sixth one or something,
and I decided on just a plain background,
blue or green,
and I was going to concentrate on the figure then, just the figure.
When he got to about 20 or 30,
I called him and said, "Can I come and see you?"
And that's when I suggested that we could do
a very contained exhibition if he was able to fill this space,
which, of course... He loves that sort of challenge.
And I knew, from working with him on the landscape exhibition,
that he relishes that.
This is Margaret, your older sister.
Yes, and she came with Pauline.
I think she's comfortable with me.
You see, she's comfortable, she's sat before.
She's sat many times, hasn't she?
Yes, and so she's comfortable with me,
whereas Pauline wasn't quite.
They're just drawn and painted.
And I draw it out
in about 45 minutes, I think.
Charcoal straight onto the canvas. Charcoal straight onto the canvas.
And then I start painting, putting in the background and things
and that's all I'm doing. But she's very much at ease, isn't she?
Yeah, she is. She's sitting at ease.
She knows what to expect, she's done it so many times before.
Yeah. And she's looking at me. Yes. Absolutely looking at me. Yeah.
Once the eyes are in there like that,
I wouldn't touch them, yeah.
What you can do now is demystify how David Hockney creates a drawing,
and it is absolutely fascinating to watch it.
His hands just are fluid, and the lines,
and you can see those pauses when he's looking up
and he's working out his perspective.
But there's a moment at which there's...
I can only call it a kind of magic comes into play,
and you think, "No, he's got it now, and I'm still not quite sure...
I've been watching it but I'm still not quite sure
how he's achieved it."
I mean, to see yourself painted,
to see the finished product, is a very strange thing
because it wasn't me as I understood myself to look.
So it's not like looking in the mirror.
You're sitting there for three days. You can't hold an expression,
so your expression has to be one that's quite neutral.
So it's not one that you often see yourself.
And the one that's in the exhibition is actually the second portrait he did of me.
And when I was leaving... After having that done, I stayed with him for a few days,
and he said to me, "You're happy with it, aren't you?"
And I said, "David, I love it. It's fantastic."
And I said, "Do you think you got me?"
And he said, "Well, I've got an aspect of you."
The fact that none of these are commissions is a very important thing,
because we all went with no expectations.
We weren't paying for it, so we had no expectations.
So we weren't able to say, "Can you make me look more youthful?"
or, "Can you make sure that you square up my shoulders?"
There was none of that, which gave him absolute freedom
and was a very important aspect of the series.
This still life is quite early in the series
and when David sent it through to me,
I saw it first on my iPhone and thought,
"Ah, well, that's just glorious. It's just gorgeous."
And when I went to LA, then, and looked at the still life
and talked about having a portrait exhibition,
I said, "Couldn't we just put that in? It's a kind of a portrait, too, isn't it?"
And so, we always joked about including it
and in the end, we did. We decided to,
and David came up with the title 82 Portraits...
It was changing all the time.
It started off as '70-something Portraits' and kept going up,
but it remained '..and 1 Still-life'.
David, this is the first time you've shown at the Royal Academy
since 2012.
600,000 people visited it, that exhibition, here at the Academy.
1.2 million in total.
And then four years later,
here we are with a new series, portraiture.
Is this a more intimate reaction to the sublime space of landscape
that made you want to turn your attention to the human figure again?
Well, I mean, when I began,
of course, I didn't plan it like this.
I mean, I just began with that picture of JP.
JP like this.
Even then, I mean, there was a month before I did anything else.
You'd been ill and a friend of yours had died in tragic circumstances.
Yeah. Well, we went back to California
because we were going to do a show in San Francisco
and we'd got back and Bridlington went with us.
We were very down.
I just began drawing in the garden a bit.
I mean, it was about a month later and JP was sitting there like this
and I suddenly thought, "I'll paint. I'll paint."
Is there a sense... Redemption is perhaps
too broad an idea, but if you started off
with you and one of your closest friends
feeling so down about the world, there does seem a lightness.
So you could almost see it as a journey into light.
Is that too simple? Well, yes, it was.
I mean, er, I think you can see
I get to feel better and better.
So is painting cathartic for you? Has it always been cathartic to some extent?
Yes, yes. I mean, I really enjoyed doing them. I did.
Each one was quite hard.
I mean, each one, I had to start and draw it,
and that was quite tense, doing it.
But I did thoroughly enjoy doing them. I did.
A different acrylic paint at the beginning...
You shifted the particular paint, didn't you?
Er, yes, well, the first... Larry and Jonathan there,
they were with Liquitex, which dries very quickly,
and then JP found this other acrylic paint that has more gel init,
so it dries slower
and you can work on the faces and blend and things like that.
And so, I think... I think this was paint made for me,
made for my method of painting.
And it is, and it dries overnight, of course.
Each day, JP would photograph them,
and he'd send me, on the iPad, the picture
at the end of the day.
And then I'd look at it in the bedroom
and then the next day I'd know
exactly how to start again, what to do.
And so...I'm saying it's a 20-hour exposure,
but it's actually longer
because I did look at them, study it,
and that's how they were done.
I think there's a happiness to these paintings.
He's enjoying himself. But also, he's not trying to be Lucian Freud.
He's not trying to do traditional portraits here at all.
If you look at them, the thing that stayed in my mind from them
is the colours. The colours are superb.
They're full of fizzing colour.
And what he's really looking at is the clothes the people are wearing,
all the bright colours that they're wearing,
and I think he was very much thinking about Matisse
and Matisse's art and the expressiveness of colour.
There's actually a game going on in which he's enjoying
and exploring the power of colour to scintillate,
and the effect is very strong,
that while you might go up to an individual in one of those paintings
and say, "Oh, it doesn't look like any..." (MUMBLES)
what you actually come away with is the colours
and the emotional work that the colours do.
Just as Matisse used colour to express things,
Hockney there gives you a vibrant fizz
of life-enhancing, redemptive,
joyous colour.
MARTIN: Posing for a portrait to David Hockney
was a very different experience from posing to Lucian Freud,
which is another experience I had
and, actually, David Hockney had himself,
and that difference was, I think, partly because of
David's conception of the series, that it...
Each picture was, as he put it, a 20-hour take.
So he'd constricted himself, not to a very short period,
but to a relatively short period of time.
In contrast, a Freud portrait might take
130, 140, 150 hours,
so it's a lot more time.
And so David was concentrating pretty hard
on just the business of observing and painting while he was at work.
Lucian would put down the brush and reminisce
and spend a lot of time mixing up paints, chatting,
then concentrate for a bit.
David was concentrating absolutely 100% of the time
during the sittings and more or less in silence.
He would say the occasional thing -
"You can move your foot a bit now,"
that kind of thing, but not anecdote, not conversation.
That came afterwards, when one sat down and we relaxed on thesofa
and he'd have a look at the picture, and then he might start chatting.
So he was actually a rather different person
from the social David Hockney,
who is a great conversationalist, actually.
The artist David Hockney was largely silent and an observer.
What David's got is me looking very hard at what he's doing,
how he's operating with his palette,
what the difference is and the procedure is
here in the Hockney studio.
So I look rather, despite jet-lag,
rather bright and alert in that picture.
Every sitter you chose was known to you. Is that right? Oh, yes.
I mean, everybody I know, everyone I know...
And you consider this a single work of art.
It's a continuous work of 83 paintings.
Well, I think so, yes. I mean, I've kept them...
I'm going to do more when I get back.
I mean, I've done...
Actually, I've done about 94 because we left some out.
I painted one or two people three times, some twice.
I only left out one person
who had given me three days,
but I did point out he was the only person not looking at me.
Interesting. So, Rembrandt once said that every painting he made,
to a certain extent, was a self-portrait.
There is no explicit self-portrait here.
Do you see these as extensions of the self sometimes,
or were you quite remote or dispassionate when making them?
Well, I did them, I painted them.
They did get clearer.
I mean, if you look at the first ones
and then look at the last ones just over there,
you can see how the colour gets stronger,
the drawing gets stronger.
They get more resolve because you have a facility,
you realise what it is you're doing. It becomes easier.
Yes, and I understand more what I'm doing.
By the time I got to paint Little Rufus...
he understood what I was doing.
Well, both his parents are artists. But I wonder whether
there came a moment where you systematically
wanted to paint the ages of man, or mankind, from 11 to 80,
or whether that was just in the nature of the people that you knew.
Well, I mean, I became aware of that.
I mean, I became aware I was painting people...
I mean, Leon Banks was 92.
Rita's 91.
And then I thought,
"Well, I'd like to do some young people as well."
So, actually, there's all ages here. There is.
And as they built up,
when I'd done 40, say,
I would then hang them up,
even when they were just first done.
I'd hang them up to make sure they were different from the others,
because all their legs are different, the way they are,
what happens with the feet and things.
None jump out because they all jump out.
You have to look at them all because they're all individuals.
You seem to have as much curiosity now
as you did ten years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago.
But as you get older, do you have to try sometimes
to step outside the artist you've become?
Or is it just part of your natural curiosity
to make things anew every time? Well, I am naturally curious.
I mean, we went to China last year,
and they were animating scrolls
and I thought they were superb.
I think... Well, there was thousands of scrolls.
Well, a scroll, only one person at a time can see them,
but now with these big screens and animation,
I mean, they can look back at their past art
and now do it on a whole new way.
I think that's very exciting, actually.
I think there's a lot you can do with painting now, a lot more.
And you don't feel the pressure
of public expectation when you make art?
Oh, no. I mean, I...
I live in LA very quietly and I just think about painting.
I just now read and paint, really,
cos that's all I can do, and...
But I'm always thinking about painting
and thinking about what to do next, yes.
I mean, we've done a great big Taschen book.
You know, I'm doing a... One of these big SUMO books.
And that made me look back.
I found lots of things from Bradford School of Art,
er, that I had forgotten about.
Does looking back give you ideas to go forward,
or have you got plenty of ideas? Well, it has, actually.
I mean, it made me see a lot more what I'd done,
and I think, "Well, yes, that was rather good
and I could develop that a bit more now.
I didn't develop it enough."
When I go back, I'm just gonna carry on.
I mean, you gotta have something to do, don't ya?
And I do have something to do.
In terms of his standing in the whole history of art,
he's done paintings that'll never be forgotten,
paintings that defined an era.
So, I think to have done definitive paintings of modern life
is a great achievement.
Whatever else he does, whatever you think of other works he may have done,
David Hockney is an artist who will always be remembered,
and will always be remembered as...
in a happy way for someone who had a sense of beauty.
I'm working more than I ever did. I mean, er...
I'll tell you this. People tell me to stop smoking.
I don't smoke when I paint,
but when I stop, which I do occasionally
to look at, to reassess what you're doing
and when will I do it,
that's when I have a cigarette, usually.
And, er,
the people who tell me to stop smoking,
they're telling me at that moment, I should think about my body.
Well, I don't want to think about my body.
I want to think about the painting.
Portraiture, landscape and still life. What else is there?
(LAUGHS)
You might say. I don't know.
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