A Tribe of One

A quintessentially British artist, David Hockney’s work is nevertheless loved around the world. Here, David’s friend and collaborator, Martin Gayford, discusses his long career and constantly evolving style

David Hockney once reflected on the life artistic: “Most painters just stay with something they’ve found, don’t they?” he mused – meaning that they stick to a recognizable idiom, a signature style. Then David paused and stated his own philosophy of art and life: “But for me, it’s important to carry on changing.”

He’s been doing that for seven decades now, ever since he began to study at art school in the 1960s. David’s work has altered hugely over the years, so much so that an art historian of the future might struggle to believe they were the creations of a single person. What is it that connects his elegantly naturalistic portraits of the late ’60s and early ’70s, his photographic collages of the ’80s, Yorkshire landscapes of the 2000s, the iPad drawings, multiscreen films, and digital works of the past decade and a half? Nothing, except that they all have indefinable Hockney-ish joie de vivre.

If painters were generals, you might say that David has had a Napoleonic career. Beginning life in a Yorkshire wool town that was still in many ways Victorian, he went on to conquer the world of modern art. He is not only the most expensive living artist at auction (an accolade about which he has no interest at all), but also by many measures the most popular.

David recently had a hugely successful exhibition in Tokyo, he is well-known in China, and highly respected in France, where he has lived for much of the past few years. He admits his spoken French is rather primitive, but points out that he communicates very well with the public in France nonetheless – in line and color. “I’ve had lots of exhibitions there,” he says.

In the United States, where David lived for many years, he was regarded for a while as an American artist. The truth is that he is a remarkably international figure. A few years ago, he defined himself as “an English Los Angelino, now resident in France.” Indeed, with the possible exception of Francis Bacon, there has never been a British artist who is better-known throughout the world.

Nor, certainly, has there ever been one with more recognition within the U.K. His old friend, the British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, once remarked to me that David had been famous, continuously, since he left the Royal College of Art in 1962. “That’s not a good thing necessarily, it’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Melvyn observed, “but it is highly unusual.” You might see David as a precursor of later art stars such as Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst if he wasn’t such a unique individual.

David is sui generis, a member of a tribe of one. He has always been a non-joiner. Once at an exhibition opening in the 1960s, he stood up and made a very short speech: “I am not a Pop artist.” Indeed, he never was (although that has not stopped newspapers and broadcasters, for want of another label, describing him as such to this day). Nor has David ever worried about going against the tide of fashion. He was a naturalistic artist when abstract and conceptual art was all the rage; he could draw like an Old Master in an age when art schools were closing the life rooms. On the other hand, he experimented with new technologies such as digital drawing on his iPhone and iPad at a time when other painters hesitated to do so.

David was born on July 9, 1937, in the Yorkshire city of Bradford in the north of England, the fourth child out of five; his father, Kenneth, was an accountant’s clerk. Superficially, this might not have seemed a particularly “privileged” background. But there are different ways of being advantaged.

Somehow, Kenneth – and perhaps more particularly his wife, Laura – managed to instill high levels of innate self-confidence into their children. David was not the only successful member of the family – his older brother, Paul, rose to become Lord Mayor of Bradford. Nothing in this background predisposed him to art, however, as a child David formed the ambition to become a painter – and stuck to it. His younger brother, John, recalled, “Even at 11 years old, his only agenda was art; it was his only reason for living.”

From the age of 16, David attended Bradford School of Art, where he drew every day, then stayed on for extra classes in the evening. “Well,” he said, with characteristic understatement, “at the end of four years you’ve got quite good at drawing.” When David arrived at the Royal College of Art following his National Service, he was already a virtuoso draftsman, the successor of Van Gogh and Picasso. He has remained so ever since.

One day not long after he left art school, David noticed that he could make enough to live from his work as an artist. “Well, then,” he thought, “I’m rich.” It was a characteristically idiosyncratic piece of reasoning. David’s definition of wealth wouldn’t work for everybody, but it suited him perfectly. In his case, freedom has always counted much more than money. Or rather, the latter is only useful because it facilitates the former.

In 1964, David visited Los Angeles for the first time and found it was the perfect place for him at that point in time. He had expected it to be good, but when he actually got there, he announced that it was “three times better.”

California’s sunlight and space felt like the meteorological opposite of West Yorkshire. “The first 20 years of my life were spent in Bradford, and that of course colors the way you look at things,” he said. “Bradford never really had shadows because it never had bright sun. So, even after being in L.A. 25 years, every morning I thought: ‘Oh, it’s a lovely sunny morning.’ Whereas, if you’d been born there, you’d just think: ‘Another morning.’”

More recently, David made a close study of sunrises seen from his farmhouse in Normandy. Occasionally, however, it was misty and there would be “a Bradford sunrise,” by which he meant, “you couldn’t see it at all.”

If L.A. was a city of sunlight and warmth, to David it also seemed free of the bossy constraints of postwar Britain. Recently, he mused that back in Britain he would never have become a good friend of the writer Christopher Isherwood, “because of the class system.” The latter was by birth a gentleman, heir to a country estate in Cheshire. In L.A. such distinctions meant nothing. Shortly after David arrived in the city, Christopher – introduced by a friend – invited him to dinner. Before long, the writer and his partner, Don Bachardy, were posing for a double portrait, which turned out to be a masterpiece.

The most important lesson David learned from his father was, “Don’t worry about what the neighbors think.” David took that to heart. In the 1960s, at a time when same-sex relations were illegal, he was openly gay – and relaxed about it. It’s the same when David is at work in his studio – he makes pictures of what interests him.

Once, at a press conference, he was asked if he had a message. He thought for a moment, then answered, “Nothing specific, just love life.” There are many other things that excite and stimulate him – including light, space, and color. But that infectious positivity might be the fundamental reason that he and his art are both loved so much in return.