“Love life,” said David Hockney, and he brought a brightness to life like no other Briton of his age. If you made a word cloud around him, it would include Yorkshire, gay, peroxide, swimming pools, California, smoking… but a word cloud would never do.
Exquisite pencil portraits of friends; huge brightly coloured canvases of landscapes; watercolours of Norway and Japan; opera sets; iPad works; studies of water, aging faces, changing leaf patterns; plastic water bottles and flowers; complex photographic collages; and simple, sexy watercolours… the dazzling array of images he brought us will never be forgotten.
Behind the insouciant, amused façade – the brightly coloured spectacles and Rupert Bear tweed checks – and the impressions of a hedonistic life, David was one of the hardest-working people you would ever meet. He never stopped.
In 2002 he painted me in his studio (an uncanny and unsettling likeness, which I could never afford to buy) and showed me cabinet after cabinet stuffed with notebooks, hundreds of beautiful, instant drawings and watercolours he made while moving around.
I was back in the same studio late last year when, surrounded by medical apparatus and attended by a nurse, he was still hard at work, surrounded by recent acrylic paintings and talking nineteen to the dozen about his recent reading on art theory.
And yet, in an art world heavily overburdened by theoretical nonsense, David cut through with simple, not simplistic, propositions. Art was an act of love. Drawing and painting are designed to bring people closer to the world that surrounds them. It’s about joy and celebration but also about looking harder, noticing more.
Hockney was also very lucky in being gifted an almost unearthly talent. He would say that you needed three things for art – the eye, the hand and the heart. Two were not enough. But his innate ability to draw, which can reasonably be compared to Rubens or Ingres or Picasso, gave him a head start few others could dream of.
From there, by dint of ferocious hard work, he began to build a world of images which, like any great art, then changed our perceptions of the world around us. Just as we can’t see French landscapes without being unconsciously affected by Monet and Cézanne, so California and the Yorkshire wolds are changed in the eyes of the rest of us by Hockney.
His current exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London shows the changing year in Normandy, in a way which will alter the eyesight of anyone who sees it, and then travels there.
So his art, and his popularity, come from simple sources: a delight in the world around him and a vast ability to convey it. But although he was mildly contemptuous of abstract and conceptual art, he was a deep thinker about perception. He would use everything from fax machines to multiple cameras mounted on the front of a Land Rover to bring the sensation of looking closer, while making it unfamiliar enough to attract the eye.
His deep passion for the visual world will never leave it. I’m writing this brief tribute in a room containing many of his many books. If the sky darkens, or I feel sad, opening them is faster, cheaper and more effective than any drug – not that he was ever a puritan on that subject.
Nor do I want to make him sound cosy, any more than his fellow Yorkshireman Alan Bennett likes being regarded as cuddly; David was kind but also sharp, opinionated and highly critical of the political world around him. “End Bossiness Soon” read badges he liked to hand out (“End Bossiness Now” would have been too bossy, he once told me). He disliked all authority and his natural anarchism included insisting on smoking wherever he wasn’t physically prevented from doing so.
He always had something interesting to say, some new book or author to press on one, a film he was horrified you hadn’t yet seen, fresh thoughts, often rude, about rising stars of the art world. Yes, 88 is a good age but he will be horribly missed. A swirling, explosive star has gone out.
Was he one of the great artists? It is notoriously hard to make these judgements in the moment but virtually every single major art museum in the world thinks the answer is yes. I can’t think of an artist so loved by millions in the world today. The man is gone but the pictures live on. “Spring cannot be cancelled” was one of his more recent slogans. Nor can David Hockney.
[Further reading: David Hockney writ large]
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