INTRODUCTION

I first met David Hockney when I was seventeen, up in London for a day from school and hanging out at the Kasmin Gallery, whose owners, John Kasmin and Sheridan Dufferin, were friends of my mother. As a rather innocent and conventional Etonian, I was intrigued by Hockney’s bleached-blond hair, his brightly coloured clothes and the fact that he was so obviously homosexual. His Yorkshire accent reminded me of home, for I had been brought up on the East Yorkshire Wolds, though my southern schooling meant there was not a trace of dialect in my own voice. I was immediately fascinated by his paintings, with their childish figures, and the words and numbers scrawled on them. I tried to persuade my mother to buy one for me, but she had no intention of spending over £200 on what she considered a foolish whim, though she did fork out a fiver for a small etching of a man’s head perched precariously on two enormous legs. It was the first work of art I ever owned.

Man, 1964 (illustration credit itr.1)

Over the next few years, though I did not get to know Hockney himself any better than as an occasional acquaintance, encountered at parties and openings, I did get to know and love his work, and was thrilled when three friends, Bobby Corbett, Rory McEwen and Henry Herbert, all bought paintings by him, respectively Two Men in a Shower, The Room, Tarzana and Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head, which from time to time I could look at enviously. Then Hockney disappeared to California, and I followed his career through exhibitions and TV programmes, the likelihood of my ever owning another of his pictures receding into the distance as the prices of his work soared. I remained a fan and loved the fact that though the extraordinary images he continued to produce, of swimming pools and Hollywood and the Grand Canyon, seemed to redefine him as a Californian, he remained first and foremost a Yorkshireman. “I’ve got Bradford,” he told his old friend R. B. Kitaj; “they’ll never take that from me.”

Then one August afternoon in 2005, I was at home in Yorkshire when the telephone rang and it was my friend, the artist Lindy Dufferin, saying that she was at the bottom of the drive with David Hockney and could she bring him up for tea. It turned out that he had moved back to England and was living and painting in Bridlington, only half an hour’s drive away. He had quite fallen in love with the landscape of the Wolds, where he used to take summer holiday jobs as a farmhand when he was a pupil at Bradford Grammar School. For my wife and me, this was the beginning of a new friendship, and we have since spent many happy hours in his company, always marvelling at his ability to refresh one with his enthusiasm. I have never known anyone so engaged in his work and in the exploration of all the possibilities it throws out. Recently his childlike excitement at discovering what he can achieve firstly on his iPhone and latterly on his iPad has been a wonder to behold. “Turner would definitely have used one of these if they’d been around then,” he says breathlessly. When I asked him how come it took a 73-year-old to be the first artist to have a major show using this device, he said, “That’s because none of the young ones can draw anymore.”