Hooray for Hockney!

I am just back from Paris where I saw the Hockney retrospective at the Frank Gehry designed Fondation Louis Vuitton, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. It was every bit as invigorating and joyful as I'd been led to believe - four floors of pure delight.

Hockney has inhabited his 87 years with incredible creative energy and boundless curiosity. His thousands of paintings, drawings, photographs and films urge us all to look, look again, to keep on looking. There is so much joy, he seems to say, to be found in friendship, the changing colours and textures of nature, the sound of the rain falling on the other side of the window, the warm comfort of a dog on your lap. 

He was the first British artist to look like a Pop Star, with his trademark peroxide blonde hair and stripey jumpers and has retained a wide-eyed, even child-like sense of wonder about the world and our ability to see the beauty in it. 

I particularly enjoyed Hockney's nocturnal observations of the moon over his Normandy farmhouse, invoking, as Hockney always does, the spirit of past artists. This time, of Caspar David Friedrich & Edvard Munch and their romantic overtures to love and longing set at night. 

Hockney was inspired to seek out the moonlight having read Maupassant's Clair de Lune - a short story about the moonlit musings of a local curate who is amazed by the beguiling beauty of the world at night, marvelling at this "sublime spectacle, this abundance of poetry cast from heaven to earth".

A recent article in The Times asked, Which Artist Best Captures the True Spirit of Britain? There were several reasonable responses but why not David Hockney?

A Northern painter with the wit & humanity of Lowry, the tireless innovation and feeling for colour of Turner, the vision of Blake, a belief in the transformative power of nature to rival that of Constable.

Hockney is our own modern Monet, watching the light as it ripples across water or filters through trees. Like Monet, Hockney has had his share of sniffy critics who regard art that is easy to understand as flawed. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hockney has kept faith with an art of representation, showing us how to notice things that are in front of our eyes.. Kept faith too, with the practice of painting. I am sure that the resurgence of interest in artists who paint over the last ten years or so is due in no small part to Hockney's championing of the medium for all these years. He now favours his bespoke iPad programme of marks and colours but I can well imagine, were he alive today, Monet picking up an iPad and putting it to use in the pursuit of making a record of the world around him.

Hockney likes best to be defined as a worker, rather than an artist. A maker of pictures. Keenly aware of his worth but doesn't like a fuss, he is always learning and always working. He famously draws or paints every day.

A Great British Artist.

We may not have him for much longer - we should cherish him while we still can.