David Hockney interview: ‘The avant-garde have lost their authority’

‘I just stay here and do my thing,’ David Hockney told me soon after I arrived at his house and studio in Los Angeles this August. ‘I’m not that interested in what happens outside. I live the same way as I have for years. I’m just a worker.’ Hockney has been labouring prodigiously for more than 60 years now, since he entered Bradford School of Art at the age of 16.

‘There is something inside David,’ his assistant Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima noted, ‘that drives him to make pictures.’ In the summer of 2013, after a series of disasters — including a minor stroke and the terrible death of a young assistant — Hockney moved back to California after a long period of working in Bridlington. It was a dark period. Nonetheless for the past 12 months Hockney has been on an intense creative roll, which has included painting a cycle of more than 50 portraits, plus another series of groups of people in conversation, dancing and playing cards, and, in the past few months, the invention of a novel variety of digital photographic collage. Examples of the last two series are currently on show at the Pace Gallery, New York, in an exhibition entitled Some New Painting (and Photography).

This month a film is released that chronicles this immensely productive life to date. Directed by Randall Wright and simply entitled Hockney, it is itself a kind of collage, cut together from an archive of 19 films made by Hockney himself since the 1960s about his own activities along with new footage of the artist and friends, old and new. The result is somewhere between biography and autobiography, in cinematic terms. Hockney pops up, non-sequentially, at various ages sporting a wide variety of outfits, hairstyles and colours; while others who have known him at various stages since his childhood contribute their own memories.