Returning to his roots

The Royal Academy in London has invited David Hockney to fill the entire gallery for the Olympic year, 2012. Photo / AP

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. "Someone 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 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 this weekend, and he is already preparing for the most ambitious exhibition of his life in 2012, when the Royal Academy in London 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.

Neighbours in Bridlington, he says, stop him from time to time in the high street to suggest 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, west London, 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 once said 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. Not much has changed. "It's just like the 50s really. 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 there, 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, but it suits us."

Hockney shares his house with his partner of 20 years, John Fitzherbert, and his assistant Jean-Pierre Goncalves de Lima, a sometime accordion player. "Jean-Pierre 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.

"He told me 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.

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 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 [writer] 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."

He'd never say as much, but it is clear which of these camps Hockney would prefer to be seen in. Since his own early indirect association with pop art he has been dogged by critical suggestions of "light-heartedness", as if that were a fatal flaw.

Robert Hughes once described him as the "Cole Porter of contemporary art", an epithet that his later work in particular undermines. He's never been afraid of colour - "What's the opposite?" he says. "Gloom, doom. Why would anyone want that?" - but the Yorkshire landscapes, full of unexpected oranges and purples, challenge him to find it in unexpected places. "Even in the winter up there, there is far more colour than you think. You just have to know how to look."

Talking to Hockney, you are struck by a kind of heroic optimism in that endeavour, one that goes defiantly against the grain of his innate scepticism. As friends and interviewers over the years will attest, he can get bogged down in particular irritations - the long-standing one is the smoking ban, against which he is a stubborn and passionate objector - but even while he is in the curmudgeonly depths of these obsessions, a smile dances around his mouth and eyes.

"As you get older, it gets a bit harder to keep the spontaneity in you, but I work at it." To this end, he has always been fond of jaunts.

He regularly takes the car ferry from Hull to Zeebrugge these days, often in order to visit the baths at Baden-Baden, which have become a kind of substitute for his halcyon Hollywood swimming pools. He drives, he says, "because that way you are in your own private space. I avoid the public because the English public is too aggressive these days for me". Even so, the excursions sometimes serve to remind him of why he left England in the first place - "that meanness of spirit".

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 60s. After two or three days, she said: "It's strange - all this lovely weather and yet you never see any washing out."

* David Hockney, 1960-1968: A Marriage of Styles opens at Nottingham Contemporary today, until January 24.