A Yorkshire genius in love with his iPhone

24 June 2009

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Martin Gayford talks to David Hockney about drawing on his mobile phone, life on the Yorkshire coast, and planning lunch around the blossoming of hawthorn

‘Who would ever have thought,’ asked David Hockney, ‘that drawing would return via the telephone?’ It is a typical Hockney point, wry, unexpected, connecting high-tech with low — and in this case undeniably true. Lately he has taken to drawing on his iPhone, with results that are luminous, and wonderfully free in draughtsmanship. ‘I must admit,’ he says, ‘that the iPhone technique took me quite a while to develop — I do them mostly with my thumb. But then I realised that it had marvellous advantages. It makes you bold, and I thought that was very good.’

It is characteristic of Hockney to be carried away by enthusiasms and to do the unexpected (the iPhone as a favoured medium for a world-famous artist in his early seventies is certainly that). A remarkable film to be broadcast next week on BBC1 — David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, directed by Bruno Wollheim — follows him over the last three years, as he is carrying out one of the most startling diversions in his long career.

After decades in Los Angeles, in recent years Hockney has been living in Bridlington, a resort on the east coast of Yorkshire. He occupies a spacious villa just off the front — perhaps the seaside retreat of a wealthy Leeds or Bradford family between the wars. There, with his partner John Fitzherbert, who runs the house, and his assistant — a French accordion player named Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima — Hockney leads, as he puts it, ‘a sort of marvellous bohemian life with a bit of comfort. The great thing is that my office isn’t here, it’s in LA — they don’t get to the office until it’s six o’clock in the evening here.’

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