Sight is a sense we often take for granted. Because seeing feels so natural and effortless, we may only pause to appreciate it when confronted by something especially beautiful or striking. Not David Hockney. Throughout his art and in his broader outlook on life, he found beauty, awe and even the sublime in the everyday scenes around him. This fascination with seeing was a recurring theme in both his work and his life. In this extract from A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, Martin Gayford and David Hockney discuss nature and the significance of really looking.
David Hockney painting The Road to Thwing, Late Spring, May 2006. Credit: Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. © Estate of David Hockney
John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer and a close friend of the artist in his later years, told me a story about Picasso:
Lucien Clergue, the photographer, knew Picasso incredibly well. The other day he said to me, ‘You know, Picasso saved my life.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘Yes, it was after a bullfight, in Arles.’ Lucien said he had been feeling fine, had lost a bit of weight but wasn’t worried. Out of the blue Picasso said to him, ‘You go instantly to a hospital.’ Lucien asked ‘Why?’ Picasso said, ‘You’ve got something seriously wrong with you.’ Lucien was damned if he was going to do it, but Jacqueline [Picasso’s wife] added, ‘When Pablo says that, for God’s sake go.’ So he went, and the doctors had him taken straight into the operating theatre. They said he had an extremely rare type of peritonitis, which is lethal. The bad thing about it is that it doesn’t manifest itself in pain, it just kills you. Picasso used to say quite often, ‘I’m a prophet.’ I repeated this to Hockney, who strongly agreed with that conclusion.
David Hockney (DH): Picasso was a prophet. He must have seen something, most likely in Clergue’s face. Picasso must have looked at more faces then almost anybody, and he didn’t look at them like a photographer. He would have been thinking how would you draw it? Most people don't look at a face too long; they tend to look away. But you do if you are painting a portrait. Rembrandt put more in the face than anyone before or since, because he saw more. That was the eye – and the heart.
Martin Gayford (MG): One of the basic motivations you keep coming back to is that you positively enjoy the act of seeing.
DH: Oh yes! Just a little bit more ... I was driving someone up here and I asked them what colour was the road. They didn't answer. Ten minutes later, I asked the same question, and they saw it was different. Later he said, I'd never thought what colour the road was.' Frankly, unless you're asked the question, it's just road colour. You have to look and ask questions like that about what you are seeing all the time. Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still. The image is passing through you in a physiological way, into your brain, into your memory – where it stays – it's transmitted by your hands.
Drawing makes you see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still – David Hockney
There was a fantastic Monet exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995. They got a million people to see it. There are forty-six Monets in the Art Institute’s collection, which they lend to other exhibitions, so a lot of museums owed them a favour. As a result, for this exhibition they had got together about a hundred and fifty of his paintings. I went to see it one Sunday morning. It was fabulous. When I came out, I started looking at the bushes on Michigan Avenue with a little more care, because Monet had looked at his surroundings with such attention. He made you see more. Van Gogh does that for you too. He makes you see the world around just a little more intensely. And you enjoy seeing it like that, or I do.
Felled Trees on Woldgate, 2008. Oil on two canvases, each 152.4 x 121.9 (60 x 48), 152.4 x 244 (60 x 96) overall. Credit: Richard Schmidt. © Estate of David Hockney
I’ve always had intense pleasure from looking – David Hockney
MG: So, as you understand it, one of the purposes of visual art is to make you look – to fix your attention.
DH: I love that about it. Pictures influence pictures, but pictures also make us see things that we might not otherwise see.
MG: I suppose biologically the point of sight is strictly practical: it enables you to spot things you might eat, avoid creatures that might eat you. But art is to do with something else: impractical observation for its own sake – for enjoyment.
DH: I’ve always had intense pleasure from looking. When I was young, as soon as I was old enough to go on buses on my own, I used to go straight upstairs, where it was blue with smoke in those days – I survived – and would go right to the front of the bus so I could see more. In a car, I always want to sit in the front for the same reason, because it is such a pleasure. Early on, I realized that not everybody gets that. Indeed, I've come to think that most people just scan the ground in front of them. As long as that’s clear and they can move forward, they don't bother about anything more. Looking is a very positive act. You have to do it deliberately. Hearing is the same. If you concentrate on music, you're going to hear more. Well, you do if it’s reasonably complicated, if there are things to hear in it. That's why, for example, Léo Delibes’s ballet music is lovely but you wouldn't want to hear it that often, because you get it too easily. It's not quite complicated enough.
Pictures influence pictures, but pictures also make us see things that we might not otherwise see – David Hockney
David Hockney painting Woldgate Before Kilham, 2007. Credit: Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. © Estate of David Hockney
MG: Talking of visual pleasure, Van Gogh and Gauguin were interested in a pleasure that was almost sexual. Writing about the joy of seeing, Van Gogh uses a word that also means ‘orgasm’ in French.
DH: I was looking the other day at a video game. It’s one of those where you're forever killing people. I watched it for a while, then I decided that it was not at all like any real-life situation of that kind would be. In reality, if you thought there were enemies around with guns, your eyes would be very intensely active, looking for any movement. Your peripheral vision would be incredibly sharp. GIs in Vietnam talked about ‘eye-fucks'. They were aware that when they were on the move they had to keep their eyes intensely looking for a tiny quiver in a little leaf over there or over there, taking in as much as they could. It might have been the only time in their lives when they looked with that intensity. I loved the term ‘eye-fuck': it’s a way of saying the eye is having an extreme enjoyment.
MG: Hockney is a person of voracious intellectual curiosity. It is quite hard to mention a book about history or ideas that he has not read – or is not just about to read. But even when reading novels or poems, a lot of his pleasure seems to be visual. He tells a story about his early exploration of literature.
DH: I read Proust a long time ago, and I probably didn't get too much from it. I can remember having to look up asparagus – this was in Bradford in 1959; I'd never come across it. But the other thing I always remember was how marvellously visual some of his passages are. There are two or three pages that stuck in my mind that are just about the waft of a curtain. The way it is slightly swaying, the slight swaying suggesting a wave from the sea. The description goes on and on, and this tiny little thing becomes so vivid.
That's just the kind of little detail of experience that might appear in a Hockney drawing, particularly the sort he began to do on his iPhone.
Words by Martin Gayford and David Hockney, extracted from A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, first published in 2011.
