Book Review: Conversations with David Hockney, Martin Gayford

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford. Photo / Supplied

English artist David Hockney has been described as the world's most popular living painter. He leaped to fame in the 1960s, becoming identified with "swinging London" and the advent of British pop art. Later he moved to Los Angeles and produced paintings celebrating the hedonistic Beverly Hills lifestyle of azure swimming pools and perpetual sunshine.

More recently he has returned to his Yorkshire roots, settling in the seaside town of Bridlington. Now in his mid-70s, Hockney is as productive as ever, among his recent projects being some truly enormous paintings of the Yorkshire landscape, one of which, Bigger Trees Near Water (2007), consists of 50 separate canvases (all painted outside) with overall dimensions of 4.5m by 12m, which makes it considerably larger than Picasso's Guernica. And if painting realistic landscapes in the 21st century sounds a rather reactionary activity, Hockney is also one of the first artists to take up the iPhone and iPad as artistic media.

Hockney's passion for painting the Yorkshire landscape and his fascination with the artistic possibilities of new technology are among the many topics he discusses with the art critic Martin Gayford - author of books on Van Gogh, Constable and Lucian Freud - in a lively and absorbing book based on conversations over a 10-year period. The conversations (some in the form of emails) are quoted directly with bridging passages by Gayford.

At one point, Hockney quotes a Turner Prize-winning artist to the effect that using painting as a medium today is equivalent to going to work on a horse. But Hockney believes strongly in the continuing efficacy of painting, saying: "I've always believed that pictures make us see the world. Without them, I'm not sure what anybody would see ... if you are deeply fascinated by what the world looks like, you are forced to be very interested in any way of making a picture that you come across."

There are also chapters on his forays into photography, film and theatre design.

The conversations range well beyond Hockney's own practice, containing lively insights into the methods of artists as various as Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Claude, Canaletto, Hogarth, Constable, Turner, Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Chinese scroll painters and others. The book is illustrated both with Hockney's own works and those of the artists he talks about.

Review
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, by Martin Gayford
Thames & Hudson $48.95

* Peter Simpson is an Auckland reviewer.