The big picture

I only rang the Bradford-born artist at his East Coast home on the off-chance of a comment about two small art works he had bought from Bridlington’s Galley 49. As luck would have it he was in.

“I am not by nature a collector of things. I am an accumulator,” he said. But Helaina Sharpley’s little tea pictures, done in wirework, had struck him as “rather sensitive” and “charming”.

Perhaps they struck a chord. As a golden boy at London’s Royal College of Art in the early 1960s – Hockney won the gold medal for painting – his own picture of a packet of Typhoo tea had opened up the road to fame and fortune.

Hockney has always known the value of getting his work shown and talked about in news pages rather than the ghetto of arts pages of newspapers. Even in his seventies he was a regular Guardian centre-fold.

Anyway, on the cloudy morning that I rang – too overcast, perhaps, for landscape painting – David Hockney evidently fancied having a natter about art, life and the universe. In the space of an hour he smoked and followed the drift of his thought over a range of associated subjects.

The control of images through the ages and the future of mass media; Van Gogh’s illustrated letters; Caravaggio’s light and shade; photographic pioneers Louis Daguerre and William Fox Talbot; the 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows by Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki – “very poetic”; Tom Hodgkinson’s magazine The Idler – “I liked his anarchic mind”.

He spoke in praise of iPads; referred to two national newspapers; the General Election and the BBC’s coverage, which he thought had been unfair to the Tories.

Not unexpectedly, he touched on anti-smoking persecution – Hockney’s hobbyhorse has replaced his former obsession with Britain’s licensing laws – disputes with the British Medical Association; the movie Avatar, which he didn’t think much of; deafness, which afflicts him; hearing aids; and his eye-opening book The Secret Knowledge.

He ended by pointing out the irony of the health warning on his cigarette packet: Smokers die younger. Younger at heart, the way he looks at it.

“I walk on the beach at Bridlington, have a cigarette and look at the sunrise. Doctors don’t do that, do they?”

If age or the idea of mortality is supposed to make people slower, cautious, more set in their ways, somebody should tell 73-year-old Hockney. He is long past the age when people stop working, start taking multi-vitamins, and worry whether their pension will cover the next increase in council tax.

Although he professes to no orthodox religious belief, he is the embodiment of the Protestant work ethic, more accurately the Non-Conformist work ethic, passed on by his parents, Kenneth and Laura.

One of a family of seven raised largely in Eccleshill, a northern suburb of Bradford, the young Hockney drew and painted from an early age. One of his early efforts won second place in a national advertising competition. The winner was a young Gerald Scarfe, The Sunday Times cartoonist. More than six decades later Hockney is still making images; it remains both an obsession and a fascination.

He said: “People who control images have social control. For about 400 years the main supplier of images was the church. That declined with the 19th century and the spread of photography.

“By the 20th century social control had moved to the media. They exerted social control for 60 to 80 years. That’s now breaking up. It’s breaking up because the iPad will finish it off.

“I can produce images and distribute them myself to London, Los Angeles, Saltaire. So there’s a big transformation going on. I follow the technology carefully, especially about images, and I keep up with it. I keep up with anything to do with the production and distribution of images.”

Recently Hockney told one London evening newspaper that Apple’s new Ipad would sell by the million. He said: “It will change the way we look at everything, from reading newspapers to the drawing pad. It can be anything you want it to be.” Artists would be encouraged to use their hands again, to paint and draw with. Not for the first time events have shown him to be right. Since its launch in Britain, sales of the iPad are reportedly running at round about a million a month.

When I first interviewed Hockney in 1985, he was pushing forward the frontier of photography with his recently invented joiner photographs. Recently he has been using his iPhone to draw pictures and send them to friends. Last month he was singing the praises of his iPad in another national newspaper.

However, there is usually a price to be paid for technological developments. Hockney wonders whether the liberation from mass media social control will result in the further fragmentation of the nation.

Alan Bennett used to say that when he was a boy BBC radio – ‘wireless’ in those days – held the nation together. Has the prevalence of individual blogging, tweeting and iPadding, the numerous radio stations and television channels to choose from 24/7, helped or hindered that bonding process?

“As mass media collapses where will shared experiences come from? Do you get famous on YouTube? You do, but not for long. We are moving out of the mass media period and I am not sure what it will be like. I am wondering what the shared experience will be. Some things might be a lot better. Some things might be a lot worse,” he said and mentioned something thought-provoking that had struck him returning home from the cinema in South Kensington, where he had been to see the 3D movie Avatar.

He said: “The soundtrack was incredibly loud, so I took out my hearing aids. After 40 minutes we left. It wasn‘t visually interesting to me.

“Walking back, I noticed a brand new store selling hearing aids. I notice things like that. It told me that a lot more people are needing hearing aids. We might all end up deaf…and blind.

“People in the past might have had very much better eyesight. Medieval painters included a great deal of detail in their pictures. I saw that when I looked at Leonardo’s notebooks. His writing is very small…” It’s also written in mirror image, right to left.

As the spirit of this age of surveillance and economic attrition gets narrower and meaner, Hockney responds by painting ever larger, more ambitious and exciting pictures, employing as many as nine small digital cameras to record details of the panorama.

For six years or so he has been working on huge East Yorkshire landscapes, culminating in the 50-piece Bigger Trees Near Warter, painted in sections and assembled with the assistance of computers at his Bridlington home.

Those paintings are to form one of the biggest exhibitions of his career for the Royal Academy of Art in 2012. David Graves, Hockney’s London assistant, told me that virtually the whole of the ground floor of the Royal Academy, between ten and 12 rooms, were likely to be devoted to the show – presumably to mark Hockney’s 75th birthday.

We ended where we began. Hockney related how his brother John had seen a car with an anti-smoking sticker that included a phone number for people to ring if they saw anyone smoking in a car – an example of mean-spiritedness he has deplored in newspapers and on Radio 4’s Today programme, on which he was a guest editor at the turn of the year.

He said: “They say you can smell it in the curtains. Actually, I’m not interested in anybody who goes round sniffing curtains.

“In California now, 50 per cent of the adverts on television are for prescription drugs. That’s what is replacing cigarettes. I am not a pill-taker. This is why I argue with the British Medical Association. If you take away something that has calmed people for 300 years, something else is going to come and take its place.”

People’s willingness to believe in imminent global Armageddon but not their own personal demise amuses Hockney. “We are all doomed. There’s nothing we can do about that, actually,” he says.

Although he spent more than 30 years living among the Hollywood Hills – he goes back there from time to time – Hockney remains as Yorkshire as Kilnsey Crag.