David Hockney in front of Bigger Trees Near Warter, given to the Tate. Picture: Getty Images
EVEN after half a century at the top, David Hockney is still news. This week, the 70-year-old artist donated his largest ever work, Bigger Trees Near Warter, to the Tate gallery in London. Measuring 4½ by 12 metres and made up of 50 canvas panels, it depicts a grove of winter-bare sycamore and beech trees in East Yorkshire, where the artist now lives for most of the year.
According to the headlines, Hockney also used the opportunity to urge other leading artists to follow suit, especially those – Richard Hamilton, Lucian Freud and Gilbert & George among them – who promised gifts four years ago after an appeal from Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota.
But to suggest Hockney is spearheading a campaign among artists is to misread him. A libertarian in body and soul, he goes his own way and speaks out, blunt and loud, as he pleases. He expects no-one to follow, only to listen.
"The art market has gone mad," he shrugs. "Prices are out of whack." His own famous 1966 work, Splash, sold at Sotheby's for £2.92 million in 2006. The Tate's annual acquisition budget is a mere £1.5 million.
"To give seemed a good idea. But, to be honest, I keep out of all these art issues. I haven't got time. I'm so busy with my work. I can't be bothered. If it suits other artists to give, fine. If not, there's probably a good reason."
He accepts that if artists already supported by the Tate are also the ones who donate, the collection will become skewed. "But fashions change and when a new person comes in after Nick (Serota], there'll no doubt be a rehang and a change of policy. I can't worry about that. I'll be dead."
Ever the aesthete, Hockney, very much alive, is dressed in an immaculate, soft-grey pinstriped suit, a polka-dot handkerchief poking from his top pocket. He sits in a pool of light in his airy, treasure-filled, galleried studio in west London, its irregular angles and corners made more enigmatic by mirrors.
The Victorian building is hidden away in a secluded green oasis, a lush, secret garden thick with camellias, tree ferns, box, as beautifully yet randomly structured as one of his stage sets. He's had it since the mid-1970s, but works there relatively little these days.
Hockney created Bigger Trees last year for the Royal Academy (RA) Summer Exhibition in London, where it occupied an entire wall. "I had to make it that big so that no other little picture by someone else could be sneaked in beside it."
He proposed the idea of a vast painting without quite knowing what it would be. "When I suggested to the Royal Academy – I'm an Academician, you know – that I could do this big piece, they said yes. I hadn't worked out what to do. It could have turned out a mess. But the only question they asked was: 'Will it be for sale?' which rather shocked me. These were my fellow artists asking! I thought the only interesting one was: 'How will you do it?'"
After he had worked "nearly 24 hours a day" for four months – to finish before the trees were in bloom – the piece was installed at the RA. He immediately brought Serota to see it and told him, there and then, that he was planning to give it to the nation.
"And I said to Nick, 'Don't worry, you can show all of it or half of it or even less, if you like.' I think Nick is terrific. He's tried to give a different profile to the place. The Tate has looked after me since the early 1960s."
Choosing a work to give was not so much a matter of quality as of innovation: "I'd calculated, by a combination of techniques – painting outdoors, using digital techniques and photography, working on panels back in the studio – how to overcome the sheer physical challenge of doing a picture this size."
The one Goliath this David fights, heroically and tirelessly, is his art. His only real crusade is to make his work better. A short, mesmerising film – to be shown when the picture is displayed at Tate Britain next autumn – demonstrates precisely how complicated the process was. It will silence those Hockney sceptics who assume that somehow it's all a technical scam. His hand is present in every brush stroke.
"If you did it the old way, standing on a ladder, you can't step back and look – otherwise you'll be in big trouble! It's been a complicated and exciting journey. And to find something new you want to do for an artist at my age is pretty thrilling."
Why so massive? What about working on something the size of a medieval miniature instead? "Partly it's just that I enjoy the big, physical gesture of waving my arm across a canvas. If Turner or Constable had figured out how to do pictures this size, they'd have done them. Those big Picassos are about him throwing his arm around."
He has decided to "skip" the RA Summer Exhibition this year. "I'm not sure they'd be too keen on my taking over a wall again. But there are plans for a big show of my work there in 2012, perhaps filling a few more walls, so we'll see."
He's now working on two new landscape series, "using just nine panels instead of 50". Scaled-down digital versions are stapled to the wall. One shows three trees in a landscape. Another consists of a tight coil of purple-black trees, their outline splayed like a pack of cards.
"This is a motif I'm working on now, a big theme I'm very taken with." Entitled? "I don't know – yet. Maybe I'll call it Even Bigger Trees Nearer Warter"
Hockney finds it increasingly difficult to be in London. "I keep away, in Bridlington (on the East Yorkshire coast], as much as I can, with sea and space. It's becoming appalling, the way you get pushed around in London and told what to do or what not to do. I get quite fed up. I need peace and quiet. Perhaps I'm a little cut off. Most artists my age are – and need to be – to avoid distractions. And I'm busier now with what I'm trying to do than I was a decade ago."
Recently, he took out a lease on a large warehouse in Yorkshire, "so I can see the work I'm doing all on one wall. It's five minutes from home, and I've taken it for five years, which makes me feel pretty young again."
Will he, then, continue working on these huge landscapes? "I can change my mind pretty quickly about what I do. I always go back to portraits at some stage. But really I'm fascinated by trees, and the randomness of nature. They preoccupy me because of the randomness of life. That's why I always say these anti-smoking arguments have no point."
For Hockney, a champion puffer, all life leads back to his favourite subject. He warns darkly of the way the major pharmaceutical companies are filling the advertising gap left by smoking.
"In California, drug companies now account for 40 per cent of advertising. And it's coming here, fast, but no-one says anything. Drugs that promise to soothe us and relax us – Ritalin, Modafinil. We may know even less about their dangers than we do about tobacco.
"People always need something for karma. I gave up cigarettes for three weeks and everyone begged me to start again, because I'd gone so peculiar. Why does everyone smoke in Israel? Because they're nervous. At least cigarettes give you pleasure. As Tom Stoppard said to me, 'Doctors aren't offering immortality.' People think the alternative to smoking is eternal life."
A notice pinned to a lampshade in his studio reads: "Death awaits you even if you do not smoke." "Do you like that? My other favourite is: 'Life's a killer.'" He made the sign himself, using the same typography as the health warning on cigarettes. "See this?" The packet he holds up has the warning written in German. "I don't buy any here. Not at those criminal prices. I get mine in a health resort, the spa town of Baden Baden, where I go to take the cures. Those supermarkets in Calais must be laughing their heads off at Gordon Brown putting up the prices."
He pooh-poohs the idea that politicians should be making life easier for artists. "I don't waste time thinking about politicians. I don't know any. What can they do? If anything, that Brown is even worse than that Blair. They're all a load of philistines. But then the best black music came out of adversity, didn't it? Not from government grants."
ART FOR OUR SAKE• JUST last month, the retired London art dealer and gallery owner Anthony D'Offay, 68, astonished the nation when he sold works by 50 different artists from his private collection jointly to the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate galleries at the total price he himself had paid for them – £26 million. The 725 post-war pieces are currently worth £125m. This was an imaginative gesture of his appreciation for the years when he studied art at Edinburgh University: "A small way of saying thank you," said the generous D'Offay, modestly.
• KELVINGROVE Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow is one artistic institution to have benefited from the philanthropy of Scotland's wealthiest man, billionaire Sir Tom Hunter, bottom left, 46. Among numerous multi-million pound donations to causes such as Band Aid and Children in Need, his charitable arm The Hunter Foundation funded Kelvingrove's Campbell Hunter Foundation Educational Wing, to the tune of £1.6 million (with the potential of a further £3m being made available over the next three decades). It was part of the gallery's major refurbishment, which was unveiled by HM the Queen in September 2006. The state-of-the-art educational facility on the museum's ground floor enables schools and other groups to attend workshops, talks, lectures and art classes.
• A ROMANIAN-born octogenarian last month gifted a colossal £20 million to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, south London. The extraordinarily generous Sammy Ofer, who is now 86, served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and later became a significant player in the shipping industry, his career choice spurred by his love of seafaring and its history. He is a self-made man worth some £3 billion, based in Monaco but maintaining strong links with Britain.
The museum will put the money towards the construction of a new £35m wing containing a special exhibition space, in time for the 2012 London Olympics. Prime Minister Gordon Brown publicly applauded Ofer's generosity.
The full article contains 1856 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
