David Hockney

Writing exclusively for Artists & Illustrators, author and art critic MARTIN GAYFORD speaks to the great Yorkshire artist about the joys of spring, his enduring inspirations, and how his latest French studio has given him a new lease of life – and cured his limp!

- MARTIN GAYFORD

For the last two years, David Hockney has been living in a novel location. From the Hollywood Hills, he’s moved to La Grande Cour, an old farmhouse in the countryside of Normandy, France. It looks, as he says approvingly, like the cottage “where the seven dwarves live in the Disney film… There are no straight lines; even the corners don’t have straight lines”.

David’s life and work, as well as the thoughts that existence in rustic seclusion have brought him, are the subject of a forthcoming book we wrote together, Spring Cannot be Cancelled, published in March by Thames & Hudson.

Because David is an artist who paints and draws for much of the day, every day, this change of place meant, first and foremost, he needed a suitable studio there. Accordingly, before he moved to Normandy in early March 2019 (and immediately after the opening of the Hockney – Van Gogh exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam), a spacious and airy working space was created for him inside the ancient wooden beams of an old barn on the grounds of his new dwelling.

He was delighted by it. “Right now, I need to be somewhere like this. When I signed the lease on the second Bridlington studio a decade ago, I felt 20 years younger, and the same thing happened here. I feel revitalised. It’s given me a new lease of life. I used to walk with a stick, but since I came here, I’ve forgotten about it!”