I think what appeals to me so much about David is his constant questing for new ways of exploring what paint can do. There’s always some new idea that he’s cottoned on to, which usually ends up with an exhibition and a book. So you always think of David as being present, he’s not a figure from the past at all, not an old man with his glory long ago.
There’s nothing drab about David’s views or his paintings. And some of his paintings are hugely theatrical. When I first saw the Grand Canyon, it was from the same position that he’d painted those massive canvases. I don’t say it was disappointing to see the real thing – but David’s paintings are magnificent.
When his schoolfriend Jonathan Silver opened the Hockney archive in Salts Mill in Yorkshire, David had just discovered the fax. And one day, in California, he had done a huge design of some sort, massive, and he’d split it up into various sheets of A4, which were numbered. He faxed these to Jonathan, who at the other end, seconds later, was withdrawing what David had put into his machine and, with a predetermined numbered system, put them up on the wall one by one, in front of an audience. An hour later there was a complete Hockney that had come down the line. It was a typical witty but purposeful theatrical event. Nobody uses them any more but that was a glorious day for the fax.
John Kasmin
I was David’s first art dealer. My wife had inherited a bit of money from a granny, a little windfall, and I bought this picture by a chap I’d never heard of called Hockney for £40 at a student show. When, a few years later, I decided to open a gallery, it was primarily because I’d fallen in love with American abstract painting of a sort that wasn’t really being shown in England. Hockney was the odd one out, the cheeky, amusing fellow. He liked to play that part, and he’d occasionally make light of it – he painted a piece called Two Stains on a Canvas, making a joke about one of the American artists I showed.
He stopped being shy quite quickly. Some people blossom with publicity, and he did. David had a flamboyant side which led to him becoming a favourite of the press. He would wander around in a gold lamé jacket with a gold lamé shopping bag – they picked him up immediately. He’d often say he liked the quiet life, but there wasn’t a subject he wouldn’t talk about if somebody asked. I got the reputation for being the dragon guarding the door.
