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Conversations with David Hockney

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The bestselling book of conversations between David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford as they explore the nature of creativity

David Hockney’s exuberant work is highly praised and widely loved, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. In this now classic book, filled with anecdote, insight, passion and wit, Hockney reveals the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface.

Compiled from a decade and a half of conversations with art critic Martin Gayford, it reflects a period in which Hockney relocated from Los Angeles to his native East Yorkshire. Their exchanges communicate the immense delight and inspiration that Hockney finds in the changing seasons and natural splendours of this sparsely inhabited corner of England – a delight that is, in the words of Margaret Drabble, ‘an invitation to us all to look better, see better, enjoy more’.
Edition type: Updated and expanded edition
Extent: 304 pp
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 2025-04-03
Size: 19.8 x 12.9 cm
ISBN: 9780500298350

Press Reviews

A remarkable picture of Britain’s greatest living artist
Daily Telegraph

Elegantly and simply written
Observer

A rewarding book that turns out to be far more than simply the story of how and why Hockney made his most recent pictures. It offers a series of snappy essays on the complicated act of looking
Times Literary Supplement


About the Author

Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include Spring Cannot be Cancelled and A History of Pictures, both with David Hockney; Man with a Blue Scarf (in which he recounts the experience of being painted by Freud); Modernists and Mavericks; Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, with Antony Gormley; Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939–1954, with David Dawson; Venice: City of Pictures; and How Painting Happens (and why it matters), all published by Thames & Hudson.

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