How the Wolds became a blank canvas for Hockney’s latest artistic reinvention

However, following the death of his mother in 1997, the artist’s journey back home began as he was gradually drawn back, not to his home city of Bradford, but Yorkshire’s East Coast where both his sister Margaret and brother Paul live.

It was the remoteness he enjoyed. No-one bothered him when he set up an easel by the side of the road and the peace and quiet fuelled his creative spirit. By 2004 he was living in Bridlington full-time and unconsciously embarking on one of the most ambitious projects of his career to date.

Capturing small corners of the Wolds, he returned to exactly the same spots at different times of the year and he was soon producing oil paintings so large they filled entire gallery walls.

It wasn’t just the scale of his work which changed. Wearing his customary linen cap, Hockney may look much as he did 20 years ago, but his tools have changed. To him, cameras and computers are as much a part of the artist’s armoury as brushes and paints and recently he has embraced the technology of the iPad and the iPhone to create works of art just as impressive as his oil and watercolour paintings.

Hockney’s friend, the art historian Marco Livingstone, has described Hockney’s Wolds paintings as “the crowning achievements of his life in art” and in his new book he recalls the conversations he had with the artist as he settled back in Yorkshire.

ML: When did you first see the Wolds? Do you remember your first time in this part of the country?

DH: Well, the first time I was very aware of them, I would have been 14, I think. 1952. In the summers of 1952 and 1953, when I was at Bradford Grammar School, I worked on a farm between Wetwang and Huggate, stooking corn as a schoolboy. I had a bicycle, of course that was the only way you could get around here, and I cycled around, all over... Yorkshire of course has some very, very lovely scenery; Wharfedale, Airedale, Swaledale, Wensleydale, all rather well known, and a lot of people go and visit them.

The difference in East Yorkshire is that there aren’t many tourists. They come for the coast – Bridlington and Scarborough – but the Wolds... as far as I know, nobody ever comes as a tourist to it. The landscape is a lot more subtle. It’s an undulating, agricultural landscape, so it’s a manicured landscape, whereas West Yorkshire is often quite wild, far more dramatic, which is I suppose the appeal and why most people driving through the Wolds think they are driving just through a load of fields and don’t notice it.

But because I had cycled round them, I have often said that I am quite claustrophobic. It’s probably why I like living by the sea: you’ve got the biggest space of all. It’s probably why I went to LA: I preferred the big open city, physically, to the rather closed-in one of New York City.

ML: The spaces of the Wolds are still not like the big open spaces of the American West.

DH: No, but you get a big sky. You feel a big sky here, partly because of the little hills you can see a long way. You don’t have high hedges: you can usually see over them, even in a small car. I was certainly very attracted to it and did keep coming back, but then I’d forget about it. Of course my brother went to live in Flamborough, maybe 30, 35 years ago. And my sister [Margaret] moved to Bridlington about 25 years ago. We started then having Christmases in Bridlington because Margaret was here. I must admit for years I didn’t stay long, I think [for me] Bridlington in the winter was too cold and too dark, not enough light. So I’d come and I’d stay the Christmas week and usually then go straight back to LA, partly because of the dogs and partly because I thought it was too dull up here.

ML: When you made the first paintings of the Wolds in 2005, did you have any idea that it was going to consume you to that extent.

DH: No. Not at the start. You plan ahead. You order canvases, you have to have stock in. All painters have to plan ahead if they have a studio. I joke that you have to plan to be spontaneous. You need equipment, you need brushes. You get used to planning that way, or I do, and it then begins to develop.

ML: When you started with the watercolours, you did make some gorgeous pictures of the gardens outside your London studio, but I guess it wasn’t a big enough subject.

DH: No, no. Here in Yorkshire it became a big subject. I also wanted to get out of London, simply to be left alone. If this was one hour from London, and people heard what I was doing, I’d be pestered with visitors wanting to come every day. A lot of people still want to come up here now, but we don’t want too many, and we know when they are coming so that I can prepare. In London I always had that trouble of far too many people, always saying, “Oh can I come and see you at five o’clock”. My point here is whenever I’m painting I don’t have to think about anything else.

ML: When you first settled here again, people were asking you, “Have you moved back to England? Why aren’t you in LA?” And you used to say to them only half-jokingly, “Because I’m on location”. The question I suppose people were asking was whether this is now home to you again.

DH: I’m still on location. I can’t give up LA... it’s my base, all the archive and everything is there. I’ll be back. I might be living back in California in another five years, I don’t know, if it gets too miserable here. I live wherever I happen to be is my answer. Wherever, I am, I’m living now, and that’s it.

ML: In the spring of 2008, you started drawing with the computer, a technique you had first investigated in the 1980s with different software. Has this desire to find new ways of producing handmade images been a major factor in your excitement about making drawings with the edge of your thumb and fingers on the screens of your iPhone and iPad?

DH: Yes, and it’s also a reason a lot of people like them, that they didn’t look like “digital art”. Everybody who gets my iPhone and iPad drawings says to me that one of the great pleasures is receiving them.

They are seeing fresh drawings, drawings made just an hour before. How many people see fresh drawings? Not many. Cartoons in the newspaper are usually fresh drawings because they have to be, but those are usually drawn in a particular way. This is all new...the iPad screen is as big a sheet of paper as you want it to be. Why go back to the sketchbook? This is terrific.

ML: Is it enough for you that these pictures exist in that form, or are you now investigating ways of printing them out, as well, or of using them as studies for paintings made in the studio?

DH: Well, we’re seriously thinking of making books of the drawings. What began as a little novelty drawing on an iPhone, now that we have made 350 drawings has become a serious body of work. By the time I’d moved to the iPad, I knew that would be the case. A lot of my work begins that way, as a little experiment, and then it just gets bigger.

ML: Is the feeling of the brevity of life particularly poignant to you as you get older? Is it an urgent desire to embrace the vitality of life that you wish to communicate in these pictures?

DH: Yes, there is a desire to embrace the vitality of life and yes, it becomes more poignant as I get older. It does for everyone doesn’t it? But when I signed the lease for this huge studio two years ago, the moment I signed it I felt 20 years younger. I’d taken it on for five years, renewable to 10. I started planning and I’m going to tell you, it gives you a lot of energy. I’d recommend it to anybody. I wouldn’t recommend retirement. Retirement isn’t a thing you even think about as an artist, anyway. Anybody who is spending their life doing what they like, any creative artist, continues till they fall over.

David Hockney My Yorkshire – Conversations with Marco Livingstone, priced £30, is published by Enitharmon Editions, www.enitharmon.co.uk. To order through the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or online at www.yorkshirepost.co.uk