A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

David Hockney is described as the world’s most popular living painter. His exuberant work is highly praised and widely loved, but he is also something esle: an incisive and original thinker on art. In this remarkable book, a record of a decade of conversations with acclaimed art critic Martin Gayford, Hockney reveals via reflection, anecdote, passion and humour the fruits of his lifelong meditationa on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface. How does drawing make one “see things clearer and clearer and clearer still”, as Hockney suggests? What significance do differing media, from a Lascaux cave wall to an iPad, have for the images we see? What is the relationship between the images we make and the reality around us? And how can we fully enjoy the pleasures of just looking?at trees, or faces, or sunrises? These conversations are punctuated by wise and witty observations by both parties on numerous other artists — Van Gogh or Vermeer, Caravaggio, Monet or Picasso — and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of California, where Hockney spent so many years, and Yorkshire, the birthplace to which he has now returned.