Hockneys that grow on you

A painting by David Hockey being shown for the first time in public at Salts Mill shows a mean patch of bare earth, red raw like a wound, stretching to the horizon. A few piles of logs are scattered across it and a faint plume of smoke rises from a fire that smoulders in a desultory way.

It’s a tall narrow painting confining a joyless landscape. The patch of ground seems squeezed from both sides and oppressed from above by a threatening winter sky which takes up over half the picture. It’s a scene of desolation that brings to mind one of those Paul Nash images of the Western Front.

It is actually a scene in East Yorkshire and the title given to the new painting, Less Trees Near Warter, gives the key to what has happened here.

David Hockney likes trees. And the ones near the village of Warter which he depicted and made world famous were felled a few years after the painting was completed.

The title of that celebrated piece is Bigger Trees near Warter, a work that now seems on the way becoming less a painting, more a public phenomenon, especially in Yorkshire where it is exerting a huge pull.

Sent out on tour by the Tate Gallery in London, the first stop earlier this year for this enormous work comprising 50 linked canvases, was York Art Gallery. It attracted admirers in previously unheard of six-figure numbers.

Moving on to Hull, it has proved to be the most successful exhibition in the history of the city’s 84-year Ferens gallery. In a couple of week’s time the painting will arrive at the gallery at Cartwright Hall in Hockney’s native Bradford where a similar enthusiastic turn-out is expected.

Hockney had no public criticism to make about the chopping down of the trees he painted at Warter in what has become the most recognised landscape image in Britain.

How could he? The trees did not belong to him. And anyway, as he told friends, he is in no position to take a high moral tone. Artists use pencils don’t they?

But what he has produced with Less Trees Near Warter gives a clue to his real feeings on the matter.

Hockney’s tree passion is emphasised further by another big work that has gone up alongside Less Trees as the centrepiece of the Salts Mill exhibition.

This is made up of a trio of scroll-like pictures, each nearly half the length of a cricket pitch. They show a line of 25 trees pictured from the same angle at three seasons of the year. Each scroll shows a different season.

They stand on an everyday suburban street close to where Hockney lives in Bridlington. Significantly it’s the road that leads out to Warter.

The pictured seasons change but otherwise each scroll looks identical, apart from a BMW and a silver hatchback which are parked on the street in the frosty winter section but don’t appear on the other two.

Hockney told one interviewer that as a result of documenting these trees in such close detail he has grown to consider them as friends.

But he does have an impish sense of humour. As perhaps the world’s best known practitioner in a milieu known for its self-importance, he seems to take a sly pleasure in wrong-footing his admirers.

This might seem to be the case with the title he’s given the scrolls. Take a deep breath and read: The Twenty five Big Trees between Bridlington School and Morrisons Supermarket on Bessingby Road in the Semi-Egyptia n Style.

Is that degree of unwieldy literalness intended to prick artistic bombast in other quarters? Maybe. Hockney’s jokiness simply means he does see why high seriousness also needs to be solemn. Further inspection of the 25 trees reveals that what at first glance seem blown-up photos are not quite what they appear. Grassed areas along the bottom of the images are painted over. And the point of that is?

“I think they are all about what you can see if you bother to look,” says Robin Silver who runs Salts Mill and is a long time friend of Hockney.

Also in the new show at Salts are Hockney’s recent works, never seen before in Britain, produced on his iPhone and iPad. In a darkened part of the gallery these are projected on a wall and feature flowers, friends, family, dogs, California and more Bridlington.

He has always embraced new technology and this seems to be a family trait. Among the recent portraits of family and friends is one of his brother Paul and sister Margaret sitting on adjacent chairs bent intently over their iPhones.

David uses his finger to manipulate his pictures into being on his iPad after downloading Brushes, an Apples app.

“It’s not a replacement for painting, it’s an added tool,” says Robin Silver whose mill celebrates its 25th anniversary in its present form next year.

It now devotes a staggering 30,000 square feet of floor space to the Hockneys, fulfilling the ambition of its founder, Robin’s late brother Jonathan, to have the biggest Hockney gallery in the world.

The Hockneys and Silvers are local families long familiar with the looming presence of Salts Mill. It seemed like some leviathan spawned during the high tide of Victorian textiles prosperity and left stranded as the good times receded.

It was back in the 1950s when the first artistic link was forged. Jonathan Silver, aged 13, was at Bradford Grammar School. His teacher required the class to produce a form magazine for a project and Jonathan was appointed art editor.

He promptly wrote to request something from a former pupil who was already building a big reputation in London after winning the Gold Medal at the Royal College of Art.

David Hockney said yes and duly obliged with a colourful rendition of the school tie which became the magazine’s cover. No-one knows where it is now. In the school archive maybe.

Jonathan sometimes helped in his father and uncle’s Wimpy Bar, the first to open in Bradford in 1959. Occasionally he might bump into Hockney when he was in town to see his family. The fact that the Wimpy Bar was in Broadway amused Hockney who by now was enjoying success in New York.

Jonathan became a successful entrepreneur and eventually bought the redundant Salts Mill in the mid-1980s. The first thing on his mind to get it going again was a Hockney gallery.

In 1986, this seemed a seriously off-the-wall proposition. In fact it turned out to be arguably the most successful coming together of art and commerce since Prince Albert and the Great Exhibition.

Hockney’s work has helped keep the wheels turning at this great Victorian mill – now officially one of the wonders of the world since Saltaire was given World Heritage Site status.

Walk through the mill’s majestic, stone-flagged interior today and you see no sign of recession. It was built as a palace of industry and it has become one once again with 1,000 people working here for different employers.

Many are in highly skilled, high value manufacturing jobs. People working at the cutting edge of communications technology rub shoulders with makers of such diverse goods as period musical instruments, top of the range bicycles.

Jonathan Silver’s showmanship and sense of theatre brought the mill to the attention of the media. In the early 1990s, David Hockney was fascinated by the painterly potential of the exciting new technology of the day, the colour fax machine.

In 1992, Salts organised an event where Hockney fed separate sheets of a giant new art work into the fax at his home in Los Angeles and transmitted them to the mill where Jonathan supervised their assembling into the complete work. It caused such a stir, it was broadcast live on News At Ten.

Hockney’s connection with the mill grew closer when Jonathan became seriously ill. The artist asked what he could do to help and Jonathan said it was time he turned his attention from painting people making a bigger splash in Los Angeles to his home territory.

Travelling regularly from his mother’s house in Bridlington to visit his sick friend in West Yorkshire, Hockney’s road trips re-acquainted him with the Wolds over which he had once travelled as a schoolboy to a summer job on a farm.

He immediately turned out a series of stunning paintings and in 1997 also created the first series of Salts Mill paintings.

He never had a designated studio here. He would set up his easel when he felt like it and got going.

Some of these landscapes and pictures of Salts Mill will be in the biggest ever Hockney Show that opens at the Royal Academy in January to kick-off the Olympics year in London.

“The gallery became Salts front door although it was never conceived as that,” says Robin Silver. “There was no business plan in that sense. It all began in the spirit of ‘let’s get it going’. I think it shows the most successful projects are done through dynamism rather than a prospectus.”

The dynamism of Jonathan, who died in 1997, continues undiminished in the 74-year-old Hockney who is up at dawn and works, apparently ceaselessly, outdoors and in.

What drives him? “He enjoys painting,” says Robin Silver. “I think it’s the driving force of pleasure. That seems a bit out of fashion at the moment.”

Initially, Hockney worked in a room at the top of his sister Margaret’s house in Bridlington. He has since bought a house, adding to his others in London and Los Angeles, opposite Margaret’s on the road of the 25 trees. He does most of his work in a huge studio in a unit on an industrial estate on the edge of town.

He has two locals as part of his team, Jamie McHale and Dominic Elliott, whose portraits are in the new Salts show. His long-time assistant is Jean Pierre Gonçalves de Lima whose matelot cousin is the subject of several new portraits here.

The 25 trees piece won’t be going to the Royal Academy in London in January. According to Robin Silver, a few weeks ago Hockney saw that the road where the trees stand was being dug up by workers from a gas company and he invited them back for tea.

He wanted to explain that he had immortalised this road in art and impress on them the importance of putting it back together just the way they found it.

After their refreshments, the men departed agreeing to do just that.

* 25 Trees and Other Pictures, Salts Mill until Spring next year, admission free.

* Bigger Trees at Warter is coming to Cartwright Hall, Bradford on October 4.