Original subtitles

David Hockney is Britain's most popular contemporary artist

and I think it's fair to say he's held in equal esteem throughout the globe.

Over the past five years,

he's staged two exhibitions here at the Royal Academy of Arts in London,

which look set to draw in excess of three-quarters of a million visitors.

The first in 2012, called "A Bigger Picture",

focused on the landscape of Hockney's native Yorkshire

and the second, "82 Portraits and One Still-life",

shows an artist approaching his ninth decade

but still full of energy, curiosity and a desire to see the world afresh.

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 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 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 of the academy

who's worked with Hockney over many years

and has overseen both these 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.

The ability to keep in touch with artists 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.

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."

"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.

He was surprised and completely delighted

and it became this wonderful journey that we went on together.

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.

One reason, I pointed out they're the darkest paintings in here,

because they were done with cheap paint.

Very cheap flake white and it goes dark.

I was at the art school in Bradford

and they were painted out en plein air.

I did paint a few pictures of Bradford streets,

but in those days

you were always kind of trying to avoid LS Lowry a little bit.

They seem quite oppressive.

I'm fascinated that you said 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 pointed out, you know...

I love the cinema

and I'd always noticed the strong shadows in California in films

and you don't get those in Bradford.

Yeah, I mean, I knew there was a big wide world somewhere else

and frankly I was going to 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, 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

driving through the very spectacular Alps.

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 always thought that was a bit of a mad view of things, I did.

So you slightly could mock it a little bit.

Was landscape fundamentally a taboo subject?

Were you conscious of it being a taboo subject then?

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 Egypt,

when I went to Egypt, which was 1963.

It was the first place I'd been ever, and I just drew it.

I didn't take a camera or anything, I just took pencils 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'd never really painted London.

I mean, I do react to the places... I react to the spaces I'm in as well.

From then on, that was the '60s, I keep going back to landscape.

I keep going back to portraits as well.

There's a very moving room.

It's explained, it's connected with the fact

that a very close friend of yours and collector Jonathan Silver was ill,

terminally as it turned out,

and he'd often encouraged you to paint Yorkshire and you never had,

but then you produced these six works. How did they come about?

Well, I mean, he was quite... a very dynamic person, Jonathan.

I mean, an unusual person.

When he told me he'd got that mill...

I knew the mill, I knew it from childhood when it was busy.

This is Salts Mill.

He was saying, "I've taken this mill, nobody knows what to do with it,

and I'd like to show..."

He owned some of my pictures, prints and things.

And he kept saying, "Well, isn't there a good subject here?"

"You know, can't you see it now if you've been in California a long time?"

He did make me think about it.

And it was only when he was ill

that I began to stay here, for not longer than a week really.

And I kept driving from Bridlington to Wetherby

and it was then, as I was driving through the landscape,

I began to see it like my Wagner drives in California and so I thought...

Garrowby Hill became a very good thing

as you suddenly drop 800 feet from the Wolds to the plain of York

and I realised, "This is a good subject as well, the curling road and things."

But then I realised Jonathan wasn't going to get better.

It was rather a tragic thing,

so I said I'd paint Saltaire for him.

I mean, normally Saltaire wouldn't have interested me pictorially.

I mean, architecture's not a terrific interest of mine to paint really.

But I thought, well, for Jonathan I would,

and it meant something to him.

That was the first time I'd stayed in England

for 20 years or more probably for more than two weeks.

My mother died in 1999. She was 99.

And I began to...

Then my sister was in the house,

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 would be quieter staying with my sister.

Then I simply began to drive around looking at the landscape

and realised it's very special, the landscape. It's lovely actually.

And I began by just...

I thought, "Well, maybe I'll just go out and sit and look at it,

and find a way to make marks, find a language for it,"

which I did for three months.

Then after that I probably went back to LA

and then I came back and did it in oil paints.

Then I began to see... you want to make them a bit bigger.

There's a beautiful balance here, but three pathways...

That's an obvious composition. When you look in the landscape,

are you looking consciously for balanced composition?

Not...

Not necessarily, because when you're using canvases like this and you begin,

the edges become less important.

The bigger the painting, the less important the edge becomes.

Also in the films,

in a way, because you've put so much in the middle,

the edge becomes less important.

And here, because you're being more intense, the outer edge is...

It is still important in this

but when you get very big it becomes less and less important.

I suppose the edge also... When you say the edge becomes less important,

it's also about the conveying of a much bigger picture,

so it's about the almost endless space, isn't it?

Yeah.

When you're taking things outside,

then you start having problems if they get bigger.

Wind, rain and things, you know.

And landscapes seem big to me,

so I wanted to make them bigger still.

And the reason that we devised this method was it was the only method...

There was this limit to the size of the canvas

I could get in the studio in Bridlington because of the stairs...

You know, if you didn't want to restretch it, so 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,

but it was an exciting thing to be doing, I thought.

Then I did move into a very large studio in Bridlington.

We were actually just looking for a storage space at first,

but we found a place five minutes from the house

that was marvellously enormous, I mean, really big,

and I realised there was 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?

Yeah. 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 because I like the light.

And in May and June in Britain

I will be up at six because the light is superb then,

because you're on the east coast.

Most people never see the Wolds lit wonderfully

and the best time is, say, May and June about six 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.

As I said, I felt I needed to do that for a while,

to look hard at it and devise methods for dealing with it,

mark-making and so on.

Whereas in the big studio 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,

knowing you're going back to work from the memory you are dealing with now,

and then start asking questions:

"What do I see first?"

"Does the bark of the tree dominate me? Does that attract my eye?"

Because there's so much to look at really.

I think Bonnard said he couldn't paint outside because it was too confusing.

I know what he means in a way. There is... You've to edit it.

- Visual distraction everywhere. - Yeah. Painting is editing it.

And there came a time

when I virtually stopped going out to draw and paint there

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 and 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 from there

because the iPad has intervened.

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.

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. Everything in here was...

Nothing else was made for the room but this was. Everything in here...

And as I say we'd built a replica and so I knew what it would be like.

If you want to depict something that's an action in nature, which spring is...

The 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,

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 wish to observe them more carefully

to deal with how to do one, you see."

Did you see that 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 a car.

And I did two or three, the first two or three,

and we printed them that size and I pinned them up

and then I kept looking at them and thinking,

"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 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 know, 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.

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 very varied in what they're trying to do.

They're a kind of experiment in making art.

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 painting the landscapes of his youth,

but painting other landscapes, other places.

He goes back to Yorkshire

and also goes back to an impressionist 19th-century way of painting,

the way that Constable painted, 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 still be an important and moving art.

I think it was a partial success in those terms,

but it was a total success as an experiment

and as an example of an artist who doesn't rest on his laurels.

Is your approach to technology

that you explore the technology and see what you can do with it

or does technology somehow feed into what you're actually doing anyway?

Essentially I'm only really interested

in the technology of picture-making, actually.

I'm not a technophobe, but I'm not particularly a technophile.

But I am interested in anything that helps make pictures.

Therefore photography is one.

The computer quite early on.

Photoshop. I went to the launch of Photoshop in 1989.

They invited me there because of the Pearblossom Highway picture they'd seen

and it was up in Silicon Valley.

I went up with my assistant

and I straight away saw what Photoshop was, was drawing.

It was drawing

and it was the end of chemical photography,

because you needed the digital photography to do it.

And I said this as we drove back to LA,

and actually it was about ten years later.

Eventually, chemical photography has ended now, hasn't it?

It will now be a small craft.

But is your painting, in some senses...

attack maybe is too strong a word,

but a challenge to the tyranny of photography,

because so much of the world is mediated through photography?

The tyranny of the one lens. I think, yes, it is.

I mean, just as the films are.

You know, the Chinese... In a Chinese scroll, for instance,

if you had a single-point perspective, it would mean you had stopped

and it would also mean you weren't there, you weren't moving,

and if you're not moving, you're not living.

It's a fascinating area, actually.

Especially... It will get more fascinating,

because I point out the Chinese now have the European way of looking.

I mean, it's television cameras looking at the world through a hole,

whereas they didn't do that in their art in the past.

And as we begin to understand that

it's more interesting for us making pictures.

That's why I did the things with the cameras.

I thought, "Well, you can actually make the television picture different."

It's clear that you're looking at different ways and different traditions

but how much is the Western landscape tradition and the British one

something you want to celebrate

and how is it something you still feel you have to distance yourself from?

I'm quite aware of it.

Remember, if you're from Bradford,

you are aware Turner did a great deal of work in Wharfedale.

Farnley Hall was not far from where I was brought up.

It has rooms full of Turner's paintings. He stayed there.

Amateurs in Bradford always painted Wharfedale.

So I was quite aware of it,

but also aware there was a very, very good tradition:

Turner, Constable.

Rembrandt. I love...

Rembrandt's drawings as a landscaper are just great.

He's influenced me quite a lot in the drawing.

It's the drawings.

And remember Rembrandt's drawing a flat country.

The mountains of Holland are nothing much, are they?

Yet he draws marvellous space.

It's the space that thrills me.

Is East Yorkshire still going to be territory for you to paint

or do you feel you've resolved something over the last six years?

Well, as I said, I haven't given up LA.

In LA I tell them I'm just on location and they understand that in Hollywood.

I will use them both for the next few years. Yes, I will, actually.

One final question. In the course of the conversation

it becomes clear that both the death of your mother, at the wondrous age of 99,

but also of your close friend Jonathan Silver and perhaps others,

drove you to immerse yourself in Yorkshire and to make these paintings.

But do you think they have a kind of elegiac or sad quality in any way

or are they fundamentally celebratory?

They may be, I don't know.

I mean, in a way I have to absorb the exhibition myself actually now.

They were driven...

Remember, I'm 75, so at 75 you expect people are dying,

but I'm sure there's an element there.

I'm trying to take it in.

Remember, we've only just put the exhibition together.

It's really the bulk of the last four years

and I've only just begun to take it in myself.

But I'm sure that's there, yeah.

There'll be a few things there that you didn't consciously put there,

but they will be there because of what you were doing.

So 50 years plus as an artist, a successful artist,

you're still surprising yourself?

Well, I don't mind boring others,

but I'm not going to bore myself. That's what I say.

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.

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.

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.

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

with 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."

It was enormously 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.

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,

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.

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...

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,

you know, you're just putting on a few marks, a few strokes.

So it's slower, what you're doing, and deciding what you do.

But I have done them in three days.

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 of 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 that 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, 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.

Absolutely looking at me, yeah.

Once the eyes are in there like that, I wouldn't touch them.

David paints all of his work himself.

He doesn't have a studio of people who help him paint the work,

but he does have a very dedicated team of assistants within the studio

and Jean-Pierre, or JP as David always calls him,

is his main studio manager.

JP prepares everything for him,

anticipates his every need when it comes to mixing paints,

cleaning brushes, anything like that.

Jean-Pierre's also kept this remarkable archive of all of David's work,

so he will photograph every piece, every drawing that David creates.

And it's a fascinating thing, because what you can do now

is demystify how David Hockney creates a drawing

and it is absolutely fascinating to watch it.

His hand is so fluid and the lines and...

You can see there's pauses when he's looking up

and he's working out his perspective.

But there's a moment when I can only call it a kind of magic comes into play

and suddenly you think, "No, he's got it now."

"I've been watching it but I'm still not quite sure how he's achieved it."

I've enjoyed painting the portraits.

It's a struggle but I enjoy it.

And I've enjoyed people coming here,

because I don't go out much now. I just don't want to go out much.

If you go out you've got to hear something really

and I can't really listen any more.

I got to know them a lot better, everybody.

They got to know me.

This collection of people, in some way, is representative of all of us

and it's a fascinating insight into the difference of people.

You may not be interested in one of the individual portraits.

You may look at it and think, "I'm not quite sure what that might mean to me."

But if you compare it to the one next to it,

you start to build up this sense of how different people are

and what's fascinating

is that each of these people...

The relationship is with the artist, with David,

and this becomes an insight into his life.

All of these people are people who are in his life,

have been part of his life.

Yeah, they're just people, you know, around me.

I mean, the first one was Bing and the second one was Gregory.

I mean, they're all family, friends,

or the children of friends.

Doing the young boys and girls, I didn't really know them,

but I'd watched them grow up a bit.

I remember Holden.

He was only 11 years old

and he's the son of Richard Schmidt and Richard had made him come.

He didn't really want to be here but he'd been told to come.

Then I said, "Well, if you can sit..."

But to ask an 11-year-old to sit six hours, three days, is...

I realise, well, I wouldn't have been able to do it either.

And he was always saying,

"Oh, well, now you've painted the shoes I don't have to come tomorrow, do I?"

"They're perfect now and I can..."

And he was always trying to get out of it.

Yeah, I got him but he's looking at me suspiciously and he always did.

When I said, "Can I now paint the hands?"...

And the hands were like here

and then within a minute he's scratching!

I mean, I couldn't do anything with the hands.

But then I realised, well, yeah...

Then other people sat very still.

He was getting 80-odd people coming through the studio

with different perspectives in life and different stories

and he fed off that.

He's very, very gregarious.

He can't hear very well

but he hears better when he's talking on a one-to-one,

so each of these people came round on their own.

He had the pleasure of each person's company for three days.

Usually, when they sat down, first,

that's what I accepted.

And I'd watch them sit down

and everybody sits in a slightly different way.

And that's what I get, I think.

But on the whole they arranged it really.

I think most of the ladies dressed up, because they do,

but a lot of the men didn't.

Some did.

But they were all interesting, though.

I mean, I have said sometimes, you know, men dress very badly today.

I mean, I think they do.

But there seems more variety in the clothing actually.

I'm seeing it and I think, well, maybe it's not so bad.

I mean, 30 years ago

there'd have been a lot more ties and suits, wouldn't there?

I wanted the feet in,

because shoes are amazing.

I mean, there are amazing differences in shoes.

There's lots of polished shoes, sneakers, sandals, all kinds of things,

and they're all part of the person.

So I wanted a full-length thing.

And you can't ask them to stand all that time,

so I'll have them sat down.

And all I did was turn the chair a bit.

Well, your portrait is perhaps a bit severe, but...

It was like it. That's what you looked like.

I think it was very intense painting the face.

I mean, you knew I was painting the face, didn't you?

I was concentrating so much,

because I was trying to take on board the whole process. I was fascinated.

So you were scrutinising me and I was scrutinising you

and I think that shows.

So, I don't know that it's severe. It's serious.

Yeah, yeah.

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.

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.

When I was leaving after having that done, I stayed with him for a few days,

he said to me, "You're happy with it, aren't you?"

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."

And he said, "And in the first one I got another aspect of you

and if I was to do another, it would be a different aspect."

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 square up my shoulders?"

There was none of that which gave him absolute freedom

and was a very important aspect of the series.

What you don't see in the painting, but once you know it's there is evident,

is the charcoal drawing that he does,

that very precise drawing in charcoal straight onto the canvas.

And that's the thing that he does first that fixes the image.

It's quite remarkable actually.

So when you see your outline sitting in the chair,

immediately, even though none of the details are filled in,

you can tell he's got you.

I was worried about the clothing.

We talked earlier about everyone choosing what they wanted to wear

and of course I had the benefit of being the last one.

So I knew what other people had worn, I wanted to do something different.

But I know I did set you some challenges.

Yeah. It's alright.

It doesn't matter. Whatever you wear, I'll paint it.

Leon Banks came in an unbelievable shirt that was all...

I mean, I painted it.

And then there's the woman in the long taffeta skirt which looks beautiful.

That red skirt that I knew I had to paint in one go really,

because when she sat down again she's going to look different.

The folds would be in different places, yeah.

That was hard and I got most of it down.

That is a remarkable one, very beautiful.

The still-life was quite early in the series

and when David sent it through to me I saw it first on my iPhone

and thought, "That's just glorious. It's just gorgeous."

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 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".

Well, it started off as "70-something Portraits" and kept going up,

but it remained "and One Still-life".

David, this is the first time you've shown at the Royal Academy since 2012.

600,000 people visited 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 there was a month before I did anything else.

We felt pretty terrible actually.

I said it was like a self-portrait really.

I mean, I always go back to portraiture, I think.

I'm always going back to it.

You said it was difficult at the beginning.

You'd been ill and a friend of yours had died in tragic circumstances...

Well, we went back to California

because we were going to do a show in San Francisco.

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, "Well, I'll paint him."

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 kind of lightness.

You could almost see it as a journey into light. Is that too simple?

Well, yes, it was.

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.

Each one I had to start and draw it...

That was quite tense doing it.

But I did thoroughly enjoy doing them, I did.

And different acrylic paint at the beginning.

You shifted the particular paint, didn't you?

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 in it so it dries slower,

and you can work on the faces and blend and things like that.

So 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.

Then next day I'd know exactly how to start again, what to do.

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's stayed in my mind is the colours.

The colours are superb. They're full of fizzing colour.

What he's looking at is the clothes people are wearing,

all the bright colours that they're wearing.

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 one of those paintings

and say, "Oh, it doesn't look like blah-blah-blah",

what you actually come away with is the colours

and the emotional work that the colours do.

And just as Matisse used colour to express things,

Hockney there gives you a vibrant fizz

of life-enhancing, redemptive, joyous colour.

Like all exhibitions of portraiture,

you find a very human engagement one-to-one with each of the paintings.

So, Gregory Evans. He's a very close friend of Hockney's

who's worked with him for over 30 years.

In a sense you'd expect a kind of familiar affection,

but what I think you get

is as if Hockney is trying to look again, afresh, anew,

at something familiar in a new way.

Benedikt Taschen, the art publisher.

John Baldessari, a fellow artist.

Not treated in any more sentimental a way than he would treat anyone else.

There's a kind of dispassionate relationship

where you feel the artist is trying to confront what's in front of him

in a manner that's not that far away

from the process that Hockney would have used

immersing himself and confronting landscape.

And then finally Martin Gayford,

a journalist who's spent a lot of time over the years interviewing Hockney.

It's as if the tables have been turned

and Hockney's now scrutinising one of his interrogators.

But, however powerful the one-to-one effect is,

in the end it's the immersive impact of 82 figures

that makes the work so singular and so impressive.

Although certain critics have commented on the sketchy quality of some works,

that's not surprising.

Each of them is unfinished.

They were only made in 22 hours.

But Hockney works to deadline and so decides that when 22 hours or so is up,

that's when he'll finish, and then he'll move on.

And this part-to-part-to-whole aspect, I think, is fascinating,

because in a way this exhibition for me

is a kind of deconstruction of the whole process of painting.

When you analyse a seemingly finished canvas

by even the great masters of art history,

not every brush stroke, not every component part is resolved,

but the overall effect is very resolved

and that, of course, is what you get here.

Posing for a portrait to David Hockney

was a very different experience from posing to Lucian Freud,

which is another experience I've had and actually David Hockney had himself.

And that difference was partly because of David's conception of the series,

that 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 relaxed on the sofa

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,

but 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 differences and the procedure is here in the Hockney studio.

So I look, despite jetlag, rather bright and alert in that picture.

Why did you set yourself a specific limit?

Was it to give yourself a framework against which you had to work?

If you ask them for a week, it's a bit more difficult.

If you ask them for two weeks, it's really difficult.

And I thought, "Well, I can paint them in three days

and I'll get more people to pose."

So they're not fleeting, but they're quicker than most portraits?

Yes. Although...

Van Gogh didn't spend more than three days on a portrait.

He never spent more than five days on a painting.

So when you look at these now, they seem very complete to me.

But do you look at them and think,

"I'd like to work on that one or that one a little more"?

No, no, I accepted them.

I only painted them when they were there.

I didn't really paint them when they weren't there.

I thought, "No, I'll just react to it."

That's an important distinction.

A lot of portrait painters use photographs, paint from the photograph.

You feel very strongly about the role of the camera.

Yeah, I didn't want to use photographs.

If these were photographs they'd be a lot duller. I know that.

And today everybody's a photographer, aren't they?

These would be duller as photographs because they'd lack intimacy?

Yes. But whenever they sat down,

I took that and then drew it, carefully,

in about an hour or half an hour.

Sometimes they were drawn quite quickly,

but very intense, I'm very intense doing it.

But once I'd got the drawing done, they didn't really have to sit that still.

I mean, they didn't.

But then I could just say, "Keep your hand there now," or something.

I mean, I'd always tell them what I was painting a bit,

meaning, "I'm now doing your shoes," or "I'm now doing your shoulder,"

or "I'm doing something."

And I was always adding to it.

I mean, you begin with a blank canvas and they're just sitting there

and then they watch it appearing.

Of course, everybody's interested in watching

a portrait of themselves appearing.

And I'd chat to them when we had a break.

I mean, I'd let them have a little rest and then I'd talk to them.

We photographed that one, taken with an iPhone.

They're amazing.

Photography's getting very different now.

Didn't Kokoschka... Didn't someone once say to Kokoschka,

"That doesn't look like me," and he said, "It will do"?

That's Picasso. That was Gertrude Stein.

Was it?

And the double portrait there?

They're twins.

And was that their idea or your idea to do them together?

It was my idea and lan Falconer's idea.

They're the nephews of lan Falconer.

Ian I never painted because...

I drew him, I got him drawn once

and then he said, "Oh, I can't sit still for three days."

He's a dear friend of mine.

I love this because it's a slight spanner in the works.

It's a different format. Suddenly you've turned it on its side.

Every sitter you chose was known to you, is that right?

Oh, yes, yes.

Everybody I know. Every one 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've done actually...

I've done about 94, because we left some out.

I'd 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 are you quite remote or dispassionate when you're 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 resolved because you have a facility.

You realise what it is you're doing, it becomes easier.

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 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 the legs are different,

the way they are and 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.

And yet we share a common humanity

and there's something that unites these portraits as well.

The format, the background colouring is the same.

So you're showing similarity

and emphasising individuality at the same time, aren't you?

Yes, I mean, the background was a blue curtain and a green carpet

and I swapped them round sometimes.

But I then realised, with the chair then,

I'm emphasising the individuality of them

and that's why they work together, I think.

When you're making a portrait in general, but this work,

it's obviously very much about you and the sitter,

but does the viewer ever come into play

or is that always an afterthought in making art?

Well, it's me and the sitter really.

I think I'd done about 30 when Edith suggested this,

so then I started thinking of, "Well, how would I exhibit them?"

I mean, I didn't think of that at first.

You say you've made more since the 82 pictures here, the 82 paintings.

When will you finish? Have you any idea when this series finishes?

Well, I think I could go on forever actually.

I mean, looking at people is always interesting. It is.

I mean, when Clement Greenberg said,

"It's not now possible for an advanced artist to make a portrait",

de Kooning's famous reply was: "Yes, and it's not possible not to."

It's a mad statement really. I mean, why would you not paint people?

People are the most interesting things we see, aren't they?

Absolutely. And you've done recently a big series of landscapes.

This is a big series of portraits.

You include a still-life, so that's the three genres.

Never, even in your mature years,

tempted to go into abstraction or dabble with abstraction?

- Well, I have actually. - When you were younger, yeah.

And in a way, I mean, everything's an abstraction really.

You're 80 next year.

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.

We went to China last year

and they were animating scrolls

and I thought they were superb.

I think, well, there's thousands of scrolls.

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?

Well, no. I mean, I live in LA very quietly

and I just think about painting.

I just now read and paint really, because that's all I can do.

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 one of these big SUMO books

and that made me look back.

I found lots of things from Bradford School of Art

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.

It made me see a lot more of 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 going to carry on.

You've got to have something to do, don't you?

And I do have something to do.

That's Bing who said I'd painted him like a refrigerator salesman.

I hope you said, "Cool."

I love the one of Edith actually.

- Well, I did another one of Edith. - She said.

Her legs were very good.

Her legs were very, very good.

It's the first time I've ever heard that!

Everyone said, "Nice legs!" when they saw that portrait.

- That was nice. - Well, they are good.

But this one's... I think this one is slightly better.

I love this one.

I think one of the things that we wanted to celebrate in this exhibition

was the fact that it's incredibly democratic.

I don't know whether it matters who they are.

Some of them are very well-known art dealers

and others are the person that washes David's car

and he's treated them all in that very democratic way.

They've sat for the same amount of time.

The same amount of artistic energy

has gone into the creation of each of those works.

I think I've painted them all as individuals, which we are.

And the individual today has been given more power, hasn't he?

With the Internet and things.

And I think that's what the exhibition will show,

that they're all individuals.

I mean, I've got the individuality, I think,

in the whole body and the pose and everything.

Yeah, and they're all different.

I mean, we all have different faces, we've got different insides,

and I think that's a joy actually.

There's a warmth, there's a curiosity, there's a deep, deep intelligence,

and I think all of that is present in the person

and is present in the art as well.

I think it is clear that this is late work

because it's done from the motif, it's done from life,

and his earlier explorations of the use of the camera

and from memory and imagination isn't present here.

It's communing with the subject

in a way that he did when he was at art college,

but with these kind of 50 years of experience in between.

So I think there is a kind of level of interrogation and sophistication

that makes it clear that it is a later work.

Plus, that ability to do them relatively quickly.

You know, when you think of the double portraits he did, those iconic works...

They took a year to paint. They were very, very detailed works.

But there's a life to these.

Each one's three days, and they jump off the walls.

In terms of his standing in the whole history of art

he's done paintings that'll never be forgotten,

paintings that define 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 in a happy way

for someone who had a sense of beauty.

David has mused to me

that he's aware that many artists, famous in their lifetimes,

disappear from posterity.

Artistic reputations are not necessarily there forever.

Reputations go up and down

and he said, well, he knows that his reputation might disappear

and, in a way, that doesn't matter.

Although actually one might say

his reputation is rather unlikely to disappear

and probably David knows that that is the case

and that it's very likely that in 100 years' time

some of his works will still be being looked at with great attention

by posterity.

I'm working more than I ever did.

I mean... I'll tell you this.

The people who tell me to stop smoking...

I don't smoke when I paint.

But when I stop, which I do occasionally

to look and to reassess what you're doing, when will I do it,

that's when I have a cigarette usually.

And the people who tell me to stop smoking

are 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?

You might say.

I don't know.