• August 20, 1979
• Vol. 12
• No. 8

English Artist David Hockney Paints America His Own Peculiar Way

By Harriet Shapiro

I like drawing pretty boys," says the English artist David Hockney. "Like Renoir, I draw people who attract and interest me." Hockney is a highly skilled and much admired painter; he is also an uncloseted homosexual with a studiedly eccentric wardrobe. He professes to see nothing unusual about dyeing his hair blond with his own concoction of Clairol's Happy Honey and Winsome Wheat or wearing the one red and one green glove his mother knitted for him. "I tend to think I am perfectly ordinary," he says.

Since February 1978, Hockney's first touring U.S. show, Travels with Pen, Pencil and Ink, has been crisscrossing the nation, drawing rave reviews and attentive crowds everywhere. (The exhibit will continue until spring 1980, with stopovers in Toledo, San Francisco, Denver and New York.) Among the 150 drawings and prints are sharply realized portraits of his parents, one of his few women models, Celia Birtwell, mostly undressed young men and strangely tranquil West Coast landscapes.

Hockney's work commands big prices—$75,000 and up for his major canvases and even more for the so-called "splash paintings," his precisely rendered acrylics of California swimming pools. (In Neil Simon's latest film, California Suite, 20 Hockney paintings and drawings flash on the screen behind the credits to set the mood.) Most critics now treat the 42-year-old artist with deference, although a few skeptics remain. "He has been overrated—not as an illustrator but as a painter," says one critic flatly.

Hockney first visited Los Angeles in 1963, and his subsequent romance with the city has been intense. "There is a long tradition of English artists like Turner and Bonington going to the sun, to Italy, to paint," he says. "Maybe you have to be a foreigner to see the beauty in Los Angeles. There are all those colors—the bright yellow line in the middle of the road, the red curbs, the sandy ocean and houses and the green grass that looks sprayed."

Los Angeles is a world away from Bradford, a drab mill town in the North of England where Hockney grew up, the second youngest of five brothers and sisters. His late father was a clerk who decorated their home by painting sunsets on the doors. When David was 16 and a student at an art school in Bradford, his pals started to go out with girls. Not him. "I don't think I have ever had an erotic thought about a girl in my life," Hockney says. "All I did was draw and paint and read."

Later, at the Royal College of Art in London, Hockney faced the intellectual challenge of a realist growing up surrounded by abstract expressionism. Even then he acquired a certain notoriety for his clothes: He wore a gold lamé jacket to his graduation in 1962 and often turned up in gaudy, mismatched socks. He began winning prizes too. One was at the John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool in 1961. (Later that year he sold six etchings for $200 to the Museum of Modern Art.) The Biennale des Jeunes Artistes in Paris gave him its graphics award in 1963.

Hockney returned to L.A. early this month after laboring over a batch of drawings and lithographs in a Bedford, N.Y. studio in July. His rented house in Hollywood is usually full of Hockney followers and friends. Back home again, the artist plans to finish Santa Monica Boulevard, a 20-by-9-foot acrylic canvas he started last spring. "In my paintings I tend to get tighter than I do with my drawings," Hockney says. "They have a certain stiffness, but I have this hunch, this feeling, that maybe I am just starting to paint properly. Anyway, I feel quite the opposite of dried up."