Esteemed Artist David Hockney, 86:‘When I Am in My Studio, I Feel 30’

A tribute to one of the world’s greatest living artists by Charlie Scheips, writer, painter, curator and Hockney’s former assistant

Charlie Scheips,

AARP

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En español

Published November 10, 2023

artist david hockney photographed by the los angeles times in two thousand and eighteen

Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times via Contour RA by Getty Images

David Hockney is as busy and successful at 86 as any artist at any age. Consider this recent timeline:

His latest ignition began when, nearing 80, he flew from his home in England to Los Angeles to create the bulk of a series of portraits on canvas that were brought together in the 2016 show, “David Hockney: 82 Portraits and 1 Still-Life,” to rave reviews.
In 2018, his painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold for $90.3 million, then the highest sale ever for a living artist.
In 2019, he traveled to Normandy, France, to view the famed 230-foot-long medieval Bayeux Tapestry, which documents the Duke of Normandy’s conquest of England in 1066. Settling into his new home there just before the pandemic, Hockney began creating dozens of iPad paintings that document the changing seasons surrounding Hockney’s new house. The result, A Year in Normandie, first presented at Paris’ Musée de l’Orangerie in 2021, is a 295-foot-long mural of digitally connected individual iPad paintings.
Around then, responding to the pandemic, he also created a large-scale digital animation of a sunrise that was presented around the world, including in New York’s Times Square and London’s Piccadilly Circus.
He released the coauthored art book/memoir Spring Cannot Be Cancelled (2021), a “warm, inspiring report,” wrote one critic, on what Hockney had been up to in his early 80s.

And he continues on. In February, Hockney collaborated on a major multimedia 50-minute-long immersive experience of his art — Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away) — that opened in London’s new Lightroom space. The experience features Hockney’s narration and new animations based in part on some of his many opera productions.

a painting titled model with unfinished self portrait nineteen seventy seven oil on canvas by david hockney

Opening in November 2023 at London’s National Portrait Gallery is the much-anticipated “Drawing from Life” — a show of Hockney portraits that expands upon another that opened and closed after only 20 days due to the pandemic. The additions encompass more than 30 new portraits of friends (including me), family and acquaintances, all made in Hockney’s Normandy studio.

In short, he’s recently created a vast number of artworks across genres and mediums. Then again, nothing new about that. When I met David Hockney 40 years ago — progressing from assistant, to collaborator, now lifelong friend — he was already famous. His acclaimed acrylic paintings of the 1960s and ’70s, as well as his prolific work in drawing and printmaking during those years, were even then considered iconic, with many now housed in great museum and private collections around the world. But David has never been one to rest on his laurels, nor one to repeat himself: He has always made it clear to me that he has no use for nostalgia. “There is only now,” he likes to say, and that belief has long animated his art-making success across an astonishingly wide spectrum of media, for more than seven decades.

a painting titled harry styles may thirty first acrylic on canvas by david hockney

Pop star Harry Styles posed for Hockney in Normandy in 2022.

It’s true that his oeuvre is largely still lifes, portraits (of people and his dogs), and landscapes, and he returns to them time and again. He will be forever twinned with his Southern California–inspired swimming pool landscapes and portraits. But even as he returns to familiar ground, it’s always been in fresh and forward new ways, such as in the 2010s with the then-new medium of the iPad and iPhone, with which he continues to make art to great acclaim. Hockney has also long been an innovator in printmaking, whether it be his Pools series of the late 1970s (using dyed paper pulp) or his Home Made Prints (made in multiple layers on a color photocopier) in the 1980s.

He has incessantly toyed with photography, beginning with his cubist-inspired Polaroid assemblages and photo collages of the 1980s, through his more recent 3D digital photograph drawings and digital films using nine digital cameras.

And he has long and famously refocused his creative eye on designing for the operatic stage: One of his earliest productions — the set and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at England’s Glyndebourne Festival in 1975 — has been regularly presented there for nearly a half a century. Just this summer, 48 years after its premiere, David attended several performances.

David Hockney at his easel in Los Angeles, a year after he arrived for an extended stay there.

Steve Schapiro/Corbis via Getty Images

Through all this, like all masters, he has occasionally been raked over the coals by critics. The Guardian called his Bigger & Closer “an overwhelming blast of passionless kitsch.” But David lets any criticism fly off him, and occasionally even thumbs his nose, while his adoring fans, of course, vote with their feet: Bigger was so successful that its run in London — originally scheduled to run through June, has been extended until the end of this year.

At this writing, David is back in London painting landscapes and portraits in his Kensington studio. He remains an unapologetic smoker and suggests people worry less and “laugh a lot — it clears the lungs.” Yes, he concedes his hearing loss makes him want to go out less, and he recently swapped his bathtub for a walk-in steam room — jokingly telling me he knows he could get into the bath but is not sure if he could get back out.

Still, he has strong ideas on how to remain an age defier and keep moving forward: “When I’m not in the studio, I feel my age,” he says. “But when I am in my studio, I feel 30.” And besides work, the key, it seems, is captured on the pin with his motto that he always affixes to his custom-tailored suits: “Love Life.”