 Desktop |
........ |  David Hockney |
...... |  DH on Drawing |
| Desktop |
........ | David Hockney |
...... | DH on Drawing |
An edited version of this interview was published in Transcript, volume 1, issue 3.
PM: In 1960, during the first year of your postgraduate course at the RCA, you produced
a number of 'primitive' drawings. I think these may surprise many people, especially
once they realise you spent the fifties producing drawings that are painstakingly
'professional'.
DH: Well what you have to realise is... I was twenty years old when I left the art
school in Bradford. Then I'm a student at the Royal College of Art, I'm twenty-two.
The teaching is very different, it isn't teaching as it was in Bradford, you're on
your own more. And anyway, you'd come across modern art a great deal more in London than
you had in Bradford. And your natural inclination then was still to look to France
a little bit, even then. And frankly the most interesting thing was Dubuffet to me.
I'm a young student, a very young student, thinking 'well, what am I going to do'. That
[Skeleton
] was the last of something, this [Self-Portrait
] is the beginning of something, and it begins extremely crudely - deliberately. One
knew it was crude, yes. But I mean the process is simply the ending of one form of...
I mean, no art school is like that now. You did an exam [laughter], you had examinations! The Bradford School of Art had a life painting examination, with an examiner
sitting there, watching you paint. They would think it was a bit odd nowadays! Remember,
that's the kind of.... and you realise it was a good training, I realised it taught
me something, but now I have to discover something else, to go from that [Skeleton
] to that [Self-Portrait
]. But that's the explanation, which you probably deduced anyway. But yes, ... er...
PM: Were you familiar with the work of Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood from the
twenties?
DH: When they saw, when Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood saw the work of Alfred
Wallis - you remember that? And Alfred Wallis of course, he's what you call a 'primitive',
but they saw its power, there's form here, and, in a way, it was similar for me,
something's happening like that. I discovered... I remember Dubuffet's pictures of cows,
I remember the figures - it's more interest than Sickert [laughter]. It's more interesting,
you can get closer to how, to what's going on around. That's what all young artists who are lively are going to be like. The Royal College of Art was a place where
there were the kind of plodders, the people who would go on painting the skeletons
all year, there were always people like that. But any lively student was noticing,
had noticed American painting by then, had noticed a lot of things. It's the same today,
the lively students are the most outrageous, deliberately so. I mean, I've never
seen the work that much of Damien Hirst but I can understand perfectly well what
he's doing, attracting attention to himself. I understand why he does it. It's...
PM: So Dubuffet's work seemed more vigorous, more sincere...
DH: ... yes, more... You have to realise what happened. I leave the art school in
Bradford, then I work for two years in a hospital where I don't do that much drawing
- I mean, I do a bit, but not regularly as you had in the art school, everyday. I
arrived in London, I'm a little provincial person thinking 'well, they'll all be really good
at the Royal College of Art'. But within a week of looking around at what people
were doing I thought 'I can do as good as that, they're not so good - some are -
but...' You quickly get confidence. I mean the fact that they were all mocking my accent didn't
matter to me one bit [laughter], if I was painting like that I wouldn't be mocking
somebody's accent [laugher]. One then begins a search for something else. How do
you do it? There was a short period when one is trying abstraction, the hand movement
and so on, but you then want to come back to the figure: how do you do it, how can
you do it now? Dubuffet was a very interesting way of dealing with it, quite a number
of people were influenced by that. One then finds Bacon, another way - it's like Giacometti
but it's not Giacometti. Of course, Bacon can be traced to Giacometti, can't he.
And Giacometti was painting the figure in an interesting way. But I tended to go
more for Dubuffet in a sense, and that's where they're from. I was quite aware...
PM: The picture in the background of Self-Portrait
...
DH: Yes... [Pause] In fact, I have periods of draughtsmanship, then I have periods
when I go against it even more. I mean, it seems to have gone on like that, doesn't
it? In the early seventies in Paris when I drew a lot, using draughtsman's skills
knowingly.
PM: The line in many of your drawings from 1963 is much finer. There is an artlessness,
an apparent artlessness, it's... where the other drawings relate to Dubuffet and
graffiti these are more to do with children's art or child-like art.
DH: Well, one had realised where Dubuffet's sources were, so you too went back....
something else to exploit. They use to have children's' art shows at the time. I
remember the Daily Mirror
used to organised one in London every year for quite a while. But one of the problems
is, of course, all children paint charmingly [laughter] but in the same way. You
tend to get a bit bored with a big exhibition of children's art. There's not enough
variety in it to make a big exhibition.
PM: Many drawings from 1963 have registers of fine lines arranged across...
[Gregory Evans enters the room, conversation between DH, GE and PM about GE's recent
trip to the Hamburger Kunsthalle.]
DH: Sorry...
PM: Yes, these registers. I have a colour reproduction [of Cubistic Woman
]....
DH: Pencil marks. Conscious pencil marks.
PM: These registers of fine lines are used in drawing after drawing after drawing.
DH: Pencil marks, as I said, obvious pencil marks. Well they are! You are much, much
more conscious of the mark being part of it.
PM: So these are just areas of pencil marks?
DH: Well, that's one thing that they are. I'm pointing this out. But of course, it
does work pictorially, it is doing something to... it gives a distance, it suggests
volume here [pointing to Cubistic Woman
]. You've to put something there, so what I do is make a range of colours so the eye...
it's not as monotonous as just filling it in... and the technique is actually quite
good for a pencil. You can't get too thick a line, it is a pencil. And if you wanted to create a kind of grey-pink then you've to use two or three colours. How do you
do it, how do you actually mix them with a pencil? So you do a few reds, then I do
a few blacks, and that's...
PM: But time and again you seem to go for the line rather than ...
DH: But that's my instinct isn't it? All the time, line rather than tone. And remember,
tone.... The art school I'd been to always kept talking about tonal values, that
was in the training, so I might deliberately choose...
PM; 'You go the other way.'
DH: Yes. My instinct is that my use of line is better than my use of tone. So, therefore,
that's what I will use.
PM: Just going back to Cubistic Woman
. What's cubistic about the woman?
DH: [Laughter] Well, Cubist Woman
is only a title of something. Oddly enough, I kept calling things 'Cubist' at that
time, partly because it was the one aspect of Picasso more difficult to see for me.
But I realised it was the source of everything else.
PM: Sorry, the... what's...?
DH: Cubist painting, especially analytical Cubist painting. For me at that time that
was the most difficult-looking of Picasso's work. Yet I knew it was the source of
the discoveries, but I couldn't see it - I admit that - yet I would attempt to do
it.
PM: So that's a way of trying to engage...
DH:... yes, engage with something in my head. Now I would admit that I never saw Cubism
clearly until much, much later - until way into the seventies, or something. And
then you begin to realise.
PM: Cubistic Tree
[PM hands xerox of this drawing to DH]
DH: Yes, they're just attempts to get into the argument. It isn't a cubist tree at
all [laughter]. But it's a diagram, a way of becoming involved, that's all really.
It took me a long time.
Remember, I don't have a method of painting, if you know what I mean. Some artists
might have a method, but I don't have a method of painting, or if I develop one I
then get rid of it and make another. I tend to do that in drawing. Once you've made
a method I tend to stop it and make another, because methods of course can develop into formulas..
But method is perfectly good but, nevertheless, I'm always changing it, as you know
[laughter]. And that is, of course, a system, and it is a method in itself.
PM: So these [i.e., Cubistic Tree
and Cubistic Woman
] mark an engagement with... Would you do them from your memory of seeing Cubist paintings
or would they...
DH: ... yes, probably just in a book. And then I'd think about it, think about volume
and space. So volume [pointing to the foliage in Cubistic Tree
] and flat space [pointing to the tree trunk in Cubistic Tree
]. I'm playing with something. It's quite simple, and just call it Cubistic Tree
.
PM: But in playing with it you're also making it your own.
DH: Yes, yes. But that's why... The titles... I mean, as I say, they happen in 1963
and I'm calling something 'Cubist'. Then I develop the photo-collages [in the 1980s],
all over the last thirty years I keep referring to it - some things do and some things don't. I keep coming back to it in some way.
[GE offers to make some more tea]
PM: 1963 seems to have been an inventive year...
DH: That's the first year I'm on my own. I left the Royal College of Art in 1962.
1963 is the year I'm at Powis Terrace with my own studio, yes.
PM: Man Running Towards a Bit of Blue
- first of all, that's a fantastic title!
DH: Yes.
PM: I assume it's from Muybridge?
DH: It's from a Muybridge figure, yes.
PM: But the shadow, the shadow is marvellous. [Laughter]
DH: I probably just invented it, yes.
PM. And The Pursuit
.
DH: As though he's going... these are both about what happens to the figure when they
go through a flat plane. You see? In a sense that [Man Running Towards a Bit of Blue
] is similar to The Pursuit
. There [The Pursuit
] it's side view, here [Man Running Towards a Bit of Blue
] it's front view. [Laughter] That would be conscious, I'm sure. I'm seeing it now,
but I'm sure it was... Here [The Pursuit
] the figure is transformed into some other...
PM: What kind of plane is that [which the figure has passed through in The Pursuit
]?
DH: Well, it's just... I'm drawing away, you don't deliberately... That's probably
some grey [pointing to The Pursuit
], then I draw the line being pushed - as though the flat plane is being pushed by
the figure. And when the figure's come through it, the figure's become even more
of a drawing... I remember my first year there [in Powis Terrace]... I found a coloured
crayon, I like that method of drawing, drawing in colour with a coloured pencil. 1963
was also the year I went to Egypt. I went... I made about 40-50 drawings.
PM: Did David Sylvester and Mark Boxer give you a brief?
DH: I went on my own, so I worked all the time. Night and day I was drawing things
- some are lost. Some are... the problem was then... you sell drawings for 20, so
paying 10 to photograph it [laugher] seemed outrageous. They didn't bother. A lot
of these were photographed a lot later than 1963. The Sunday Times
had them for a while and then gave them back, they never photographed them, even.
They wouldn't do that now. Can you imagine, they would have made a coloured copy
or something. In the end I said, 'Well, I would like them back because frankly I'll
have to sell them to get some money'. [Laughter] I mean, they didn't pay me much, maybe 100
and the ticket, and the expenses.
PM: The two drawings of Mr Milo's house...
DH: These drawings were done very fast. I was in that house with a few people, being
shown it, and we were being served tea, but I knew we wouldn't be there long. I had
a pad, a few pencils in my pocket and a pencil sharpener, which I carried around.
And that was probably drawn in 10-15 minutes.
PM: The point of focus being the wall hangings...
DH: Yes the marvellous bold patterns they had. I was struck by... Just plain walls
and then this pattern. I'm trying to do it. That [The Man who had made the Journey to Mecca
]... I remember seeing the house. If the Egyptians had been to Mecca they'd record
it. He'd gone in a helicopter. But the incongruity of this little hut he lives in
and the helicopter he'd been in. [Laughter]
PM: Who was Mr Milo?
DH: It was somebody in Cairo who was a Sunday Times
correspondent. He was the only person I met there - I didn't know anybody there.
I remember he took me to dinner out near the pyramids and then recommended I go to
this house. And he said you go on an afternoon and you pay an Egyptian pound and
they serve mint tea and it's a very beautiful house, and I thought, 'Well that would be nice,
I'd like to see that'. Mr Milo was actually Russian, I think. Milovskosky. I remember
him as a big man - I was going to draw him but then it wasn't him that did the talking, it was some servant, some young man. But anyway, he was obviously an aesthete of
some sort, quite a sensibility. Remember, I'm just going anywhere, drawing anything,
at anytime. I was never without the pencils. [Looking at Alexandria
] That's a little bit of water [at the bottom of the drawing] but the herring bone
pattern is also like the water drawn in tombs, that's how the Egyptians do water,
but I'm drawing it in space - things like that. I remember drawing this [Shell Garage, Luxor
]. I'm sitting opposite the garage in a little café - they have outdoor cafés in Egypt,
that's very nice that, like France - and I would be sitting there in the early evening
and I remember this big picture of Nasser painted on the walls and...
PM: Wasn't it a poster of Nasser?
DH: No, it was painted on the wall - cheaper than a poster. [Laughter] The Shell garage...
I always got the Arabic writing right; I took great care. I'd no idea what it was
saying, people later said they could read it: I didn't make it up.
PM: 'These matches belong to David Hockney in Arabic
' [another drawing made in Egypt]
DH: Somebody translated that for me. In Cairo it was hard, but in Luxor it was easy
to meet people because there's a lot of tourists.
PM: The Shell Garage
brings to mind the painting Man in a Museum
where Jeff Goodman, your friend, is walking past a statue: there's that mixing of
realities.
DH: Yes, here's a big face but the face is on the wall. It's a drawing of a portrait.
Yes, its on another level - a device I constantly use.
PM: Was Egypt the first time you used watercolour?
DH: I took watercolours and I took coloured pencils. The coloured pencils worked best
but I did a few watercolours but found it a bit slow.
PM: But is one reason your preference for line?
DH: Probably. Yes, it is that. I choose line if given a choice. But also the speed.
The watercolour technique seemed too slow. In the end there's only three or four
watercolours and remember its for a colour magazine and so I'm deliberately drawing
in colour. I think they're the first coloured drawings - no, not quite, I picked up coloured
pencils a bit earlier - but I was deliberately trying to make them in colour.
PM: And the drawing of the couple in a glass case in the museum [Rhetope and his wife Nofret sat in a glass case in the Cairo Museum
]
DH: Yes, a couple sitting.... [Pause]
PM: You're interested in incongruous relationships between people and objects, people
and statues...
DH: I drew that [Rhetope and his wife..
.] again in 1978, from a side view.
PM: And the moustache on the man?
DH: It's on him. You can see what I'm amused at, I think that's clear: two people
sitting in a case. [Laughter] I accepted the stylisation enough to think they were
real, do you see? I'd already made... I'd made that painting in the semi-Egyptian
style... I'd realised the Egyptian was an interesting style with no individuality. And I was
attracted to that because it was a very stylistic figure and therefore this gave
me the way, perhaps, to find a way to do a modern figure.
PM: The interest in different styles parallels your interest in depicting different
types of people in a relationship.
DH: Yes. I suppose deep, deep down we're all the same. It's only the surface which
is different, which is why the surface is fascinating. In a sense it's those surface
differences that that drawing [Rhetope and his wife....
] is about. They're utterly different in colour.
PM: Before you left for L.A. you produced studies of figures from life, bathing [xerox
of Shower Study 3
placed on coffee table]. Later on you worked from photographs published in Physique Pictorial.
DH: I had a shower, a crude one, made for Powis Terrace. A shower is much more interesting
for the artist because you see the body. The shower's a cheap thing with this mad
curtain which I think I used, and those are drawn from life. Remember, I'm drawing
from life and not wanting to draw from life [laughter] in the sense that drawing from
life at the art school was one thing but here it has to be another. I think this
[the figure in Shower Study 3
] is a boy who wouldn't take off his underwear: Trevor... Trevor something.
PM: Why do you need showers as a reason to draw [male nudes]?
DH: Because a person's actually doing something in a naked form. There's a clear reason,
bathing. It's an old subject yet it's a totally different way from the nude bather
by Renoir, do you see what I mean? And I would be well aware of that title and what
it would mean to most people. A nude bather, yes, Cézanne. It's a traditional subject
but....
The first artist to paint bathrooms was Bonnard who, in 1920, put a bathroom in his
house, and it must have looked ultra-modern. Remember, only thirty years before Degas
was drawing them in a big copper tub. I'm aware of this because I remember reading
about Bonnard making his bathroom big enough for an easel. And I remember thinking about
that shower. And later on, upstairs [in Powis Terrace] - when I built the studio
- I made a shower without a curtain and with big mirrors that reflected back into
the studio so I could actually paint - which I only did once, I think. and there's a painting
down there [in storage] which we've just found, one little...
PM: Showers continue to interest you when you go to Los Angeles.
DH: Yes. People take two or three showers a day. I come from Bradford where you take
one bath a week. [Laughter] I might point out that in Bradford and London at that
time not many people ran around a bedroom because it was so cold...
PM: But the emphasis on the figure's outline in these drawings minimises touch, doesn't
it? It minimises evidence of surface texture, as though touching and looking are
separated.
DH: Well they are. [Laughter]
PM: But not in all your drawings. In Clean Boy
the tone of both the legs and the backside is indicated.
DH: To draw the figure you have to be a distance away to see it.
PM: In Clean Boy
there's obviously a pleasure in the subject, but also a pleasure in the line. And
the tub at the bottom: it has similarities to the registers in the earlier drawings
- as though as much attention has been paid to the tub as ...
DH: Without it... well, it's just a compositional device that makes you look here
more [i.e. towards both the bottom of the drawing].
PM: But also the lines are used to create a tone: there is an invitation to touch
the boy's bottom.
DH: I'm doing this [imitates making short pencil marks] [Laughter]
PM: Caressing the body with a pencil!
DH: But you can caress the body with the eye as well. A lot of these drawings were
made as notes and then when I start painting I think, 'Oh, yes. I'll use that kind
of idea'.
PM: In 1964 there's a whole series of drawings showing figures composed of simplified
shapes - Square Figure Marching
.
DH: Well again, it's trying to develop some form of Cubism when you don't really grasp
it. Not that that necessarily matters. [Laughter] You realise a lot of people didn't
grasp it but developed an awful lot of interesting ideas from it. That doesn't matter. [Laughter]
PM: References to Cézanne - the square, cylinder and cone?
DH: Yes, oh yes.
PM: With lots of these drawings from '64 and '65 we're not so much looking at an object
as a picture of an object - pictures about representation.
DH: I became very, very conscious of that. Borders around pictures.... the nice problem
that water gave you. How do you depict transparency, glass...
[Telephone rings - GE answers and DH takes the call]
DH: Sorry, go on.
PM: Many of these drawings are, in a sense, collages. Different styles being brought
together...
DH: ... yes, yes...
PM: We've seen that with Shell Garage
.
DH: Again, it took me a long time to realise what collage was, how important an invention
it is.
[Telephone rings, DH answers and talks to John Cox.]
DH: Sorry.
PM: In the introduction you wrote to Jeffrey Camp's book you said that one of the
best ways for an artist to learn is through copying, copying the marks of other artists.
In '64 and '65...
DH: I said that much later. [Laughter]
PM: How did a sustained period of drawing help you when you had difficulties with
your painting?
DH: Drawing is done quicker. You're finding things out quicker.
PM: The new drawings you did last year and earlier this year... does that body of
work suggest you had difficulties with painting?
DH: No... that was a desire to record my friends in an un-photographic way. I'd done
those photographic records of a lot of people and I simply thought I'll draw my friends,
ask them to sit down for a maximum of two hours. Very intense looking and drawing, very specific portraits. I'm well aware I can do portraits, there's a knack to it.
Those drawings were psychological studies, but at the same time I was painting.
PM: In about '66 or so you become less concerned with 'collaging'. Can I ask you
about your drawings of Los Angeles? [several xeroxes are placed on the table]. One
of the things I find interesting about Bedroom
is the juxtaposition of marks made free-hand with those made using a ruler.
DH: One plays against the other.
PM: A depersonalised against...
DH: Actually those marks are made with a ruler, you can see that, yes.
PM: What is it about that juxtaposition?
DH: Well, it works. [Laughter]
PM: But the juxtaposition of lines make the bedroom - a private space - look impersonal.
There are no wet towels on the bed [laughter], no coffee stains on the bedside table.
DH: Amazingly everything in California did look neat to me, no matter where you lived.
Remember in '64 most of L.A. was still pretty new: the San Fernando Valley in 1950
was still orange groves. Everything was so new. I do remember things like the amount
of carpet salesmen! We never had this amount of carpet salesmen in Bradford. [Laughter]
PM: Being neat is one thing, but being impersonal...
DH: But you did see that. The last thing it was was cosy. It's like my mother's comment
going into someone's house, 'Well, it's very nice but it's not a home, is it'.
PM: But the drawing looks as though it's based on a photograph from a house-style
magazine or a real-estate brochure.
DH: Well they did, that's what they actually looked like! Just as today, if you go
in [Denny's ?] the menu has a photograph of the food and when it comes [laughter]
it's like the photograph. The photograph isn't an exaggeration, it's exactly like
that. Even in cheap apartments, no matter what, they always had neat beds [pointing at Bedroom
] with a neat edge everywhere. They all came from the same place, probably. But I'm
noticing all this, so I draw it. The drawing of the bed in Powis Terrace isn't neat
like that!
PM: Hotel foyers, as well.
DH: I draw hotel foyers because I'm staying in the hotel. I might be sitting there
and I think, 'What shall I do, I'll draw it'.
PM: But they too are places which, in a sense, are a bit like home - sofas, and so
on - but they're impersonal, too.
DH: Yes, yes.
PM: It's one thing to do that to interiors, though [i.e. represent private spaces
as impersonal]; to do that to people, though - I'm thinking of your paintings which
show the relationship of people to their collections, the people are an object in
their art collection...
DH: That's the way they showed themselves to me
[Telephone rings, DH answers and talks to Julian Spalding and then DH, GE and PM discuss a proposed exhibition of DH's work in Glasgow.]
PM: Turning to the drawings of Peter [Schlesinger]. This one [Peter, Albergo la Flora, Rome
] has similarities to your paintings of him since Peter is here reduced to an object.
In the other drawings he isn't. It's that sense of the impersonal again, a distance.
DH: [DH looks at xerox of Peter, Albergo la Flora
] Is it because of his pose compared to those? When he's lying like that... And he's
not looking at me, he's even looking away. In fact, that was drawn in Rome, he'd
just come out of a bath. I remember now, he lies down and I say 'Stay like that'.
Otherwise in the drawings he's either reading or looking at you. It's a different thing, yes.
You know, one of the reasons why there's a lot of drawings of Henry [Geldzahler]
is that he always asked me to draw him, he did ask. In a way, Peter, when I met Peter
I began to draw him, immediately - and, usually, when he's lying on a bed or something.
I tend to always get up earlier than someone so they're often done in the morning
while he's still lying in bed.
PM: With the pen and ink drawings... where would you start?
DH: With the head, virtually always with the eyes. Occasionally you might start with
a hand, but not really. No, I'm always drawing the head - that's what you look at
first. And eyes are what you look at first, your forced to.
PM: There's not a great tradition of the male nude as an erotic object in the West.
DH: No. It's only in the last 15 years that there's photographs of boys in very, very
passive erotic poses. Woman has been like that for a very long time but not the male
nude, even Baron von Gloedon.
PM: Your pen and ink drawings must be the most admired of your drawings. The line
does all the work, there isn't a line out of place. One thinks of the Vollard Suite
...
DH: You know, they're very tense to do. Once you start you're to draw it all at once,
it's tense. That [W. H. Auden I
] would be drawn in forty minutes, perhaps thirty. You're trying to get the essence
of it and put it in line. It's tense and it comes out in the line, I think. The line
is slightly, you know, slightly.... there's a slight resist in it.
PM: A resistance also from the pen on paper?
DH: No, it's from the mind, really. I mean, I could do it again - develop it. It would
probably be a little different if I took up a pen like that. And the pen, it's a
rapidograph, it actually has a little resist in it whereas now it's a kind of rollerball pen and you can do that [hand moves in an arc]. You couldn't do that with a rapidograph,
actually. The fastest speed would have been like that [short hand movement]. With
a rollerball, that [faster hand movement], and the line comes out perfectly. That's
just new technology. On the other hand, it also makes you slip. The resist gives you
something else, you're using the medium.
PM: This slight hesitancy...
DH: Yes, because you're both... you're looking, you're thinking out all kinds of things
because the line has to represent the volume and even the tone. Volume above all...
[DH looks at W. H. Auden I
] This is when, in Alan Bennett's book, he quotes me as saying, "If his face is like
that, think of what his balls are like'. [Laughter] It's very funny, actually. [Laughter]
In a way, these drawings...
[Telephone rings, DH answers and talks to Nikos Stangos.]
DH: Jonathan [Silver] sold 600 copies of that book [That's the way I see it
], and he sold a lot of that... er...
PM: The Prestel one [David Hockney Paintings
by Paul Melia and Ulrich Luckhardt]...?
DH: Yes. [Laughter]
PM: I asked Jonathan for his advice about the cover.
DH: Did he tell you to put that [Nichols Canyon
] on the cover?
PM: Yes, and now he says it's a really good cover! [Laughter] I gave a copy of the
Prestel book to my cousin and, after she put it on her coffee table, she went out
to buy the poster [of Nichols Canyon
] for the wall! [Long laughter]
I'm still intrigued by the references to Jasper Johns's work in The Perspective Lesson
.... the floor boards...
DH: Yes, yes. Well first of all I'm well aware of Jasper Johns's work...
PM: Do you have much contact with him?
DH: I know Jasper, yes I do, a little bit. I do know him. I met him a long time ago.
We're not close friends but we do meet occasionally and when we do I can chat because....
er....
PM: Do you keep an eye on the work he produces?
DH: Oh yes, yes. He's a very interesting, fascinating artist.... subtle.... a little...
I think he's a marvellous artist and I see there's not an enormous public there,
it's a subtle kind of thing. Interesting, always interesting... interesting because
he's interested in Picasso in that way, I recognise that. I've seen his work on it, the
way he deals with it interests me...
PM: Because of your interest in Picasso...
DH: Yes, oh yes, oh yes. And he's... there's connections. And he's always been a marvellous
mark-maker, makes marks in a very good way - they're not boring, he's conscious of
it, he has a touch - what we call a 'touch' in painting. You can recognise him, it's delicious. There's something that's very rich. I picked up a little Vuillard catalogue
the other day, marvellous way he makes marks - no English artist quite like that.
I mean, I'm sure you're right [i.e. my discussion of The Perspective Lesson
in David Hockney Paintings
] that when I make the floor like that I also knew that Jasper Johns had made a print
like that, yes. But...
PM: But [in The Perspective Lesson
] you have a reference to van Gogh as well. Van Gogh, Jasper Johns...
DH: [Laughter]
PM: You have the naturalistic chair under an erasure mark... the collage thing again.
You're making reference to a number of artists' work again. It could be that you
just saw some of those paintings or prints [by Johns] and thought, 'Ah yes, there's
a way of doing the floorboards'. But, my guess is that there's more to it...
DH: Yes. The piece [The Perspective Lesson
] was not drawn all at once. Because anyway it's a colour print, it's done slowly
- which means over a period of three or four weeks because I'd draw one bit and then
work on something else. I would have it on the wall in the studio, the latest proof.
And I, I might have done, probably, the chair and the picture of it, and then left ii
for a while. A week later I might have actually put the cross on... This might have
been over a period of a month. Now it looks as though you're just doing it with the
brush, but it's meant to look like that. But it wasn't, of course. The Gemini prints are
like that [the suite Some More New Prints
]. I spent twelve, six months making twelve images. You can make twelve paintings
in six months, do you know what I mean?! A lot of time - long days, a slow process.
In the end I realised that's why I've suddenly gone back to painting a big canvas.
I started one before I started these [Some More New Prints
], two big paintings stuck together in L.A.... And then I stopped and I did these
and other things. Now I've gone back to them but, having done these you realise,
'My God, I can move about quicker, I can do this, that'.
PM: Your interest in mark making is evident in these new prints. I'm surprised you've
made no mention of Abstract Expressionism... Pollock, the paint as an index of, as
evidence of...
DH: That's happening in the new paintings, you see. [Laughter] Well it is in here,
in some of them [points to Slow Rise
]. Again, you see, Pollock... he's made marks with his body. The scale of a Pollock
is to do with the scale of his body. He's working this way [DH makes a swinging movement
with his arm]. Here, I'm working at the most with that [a swing from the elbow].
But then it gets more into this and this [making marks with the wrist] when you go into
detail, so... That's a drip [in the upper register of Slow Rise
], they're drips. You just let it drip. But it's a smaller scale drip than one that's
been made with the body. It was Pollock, in a way, he's the first one to make, had
to make paintings on quite a big scale because he was using his body. Pollock's
scale was the body.
PM: You invent spaces [in the Gemini prints] but one also reads the works as flat
surfaces, as a record of your...
DH: At first people thought they were extremely flat and I smiled at that because
I thought well, because I thought I've made the most... But then, suddenly, after
looking at it, accepting the flatness, you make a space. But you've to accept the
flatness first.
PM: Surface and illusion... these concerns characterise a lot of your work from the
sixties and the eighties...
DH: Yes, that's always a constant... And in that sense, actually, Jasper Johns...
Jasper's not a very talkative person. I mean, Bob Rauschenberg, very nice, charming,
outgoing. Anyway, Jasper Johns was in Paris in 1974 and I was living in Paris. And
Jasper Johns came - he was doing those things for Beckett, the Beckett book. Anyway, Mark
Lancaster was there - who I know very well - and we go out to dine, there's about
eight or nine of us. I found myself sitting right opposite Jasper and I asked him
'How are you enjoying Paris?' and he said 'I'm not' [abruptly]! And I thought, well that's
the end of that conversation, you know, I won't bring that up again - I'll try something
else. That was 1974. Three years later, I found myself in exactly the same restaurant sitting in the same position opposite Jasper, and I went up and I said 'How are
you enjoying Paris?'. He said, 'You never give up, David, do you. I'm enjoying it
more'. [Laughter] And he realised exactly what I had done, what the conversation
had been. [Laughter] He instantly, yes, I know what you mean. [Laughter]. A lot of people actually
find him quite difficult.
[Conversation continues over dinner with GE and JC in a Convent Garden restaurant.]