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

His choice of life on the Yorkshire coast is also more commonsensical than it might appear. Painters like places with good light and Bridlington has plenty of that. It’s at its most beautiful, Hockney says, ‘between 5.15, when the sun has been up a little bit and you get its shadows, until about 8.30. Most people sleep through it.’ Hockney’s iPhone works are done, for the most part, very early in the morning. ‘I wake when it starts getting light, and I do little drawings of the dawn, while I’m still in bed’. Many of them show the sun peeping through the venetian blind, and vases of flowers silhouetted against the light. They are intimate, spontaneous: a very old subject, somehow looking fresh and new.

The other day I got a text from him: ‘I’ll send you today’s dawn this afternoon, an absurd sentence I know, but you know what I mean.’ This was almost immediately followed by another (Hockney is as fluent a texter as any teenager). ‘Would Turner have slept through such terrific drama? Absolutely not! Anyone in my business who slept through that would be a fool. I don’t keep office hours.’

Of course, it’s impossible to say whether Turner, who was also fond of Margate — another east coast resort — and of observing the rising sun would also have taken to the luminous screen of the iPhone. But I suspect he would have loved it.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture is on BBC1 on Tuesday 30 June at 10.35 p.m.