I’m a writer, mainly about art and jazz. I review exhibitions regularly for Bloomberg News and contribute to many other publications. My most recent book is A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, a series of dialogues exploring painting, landscape, space, time and how we see. My three other books all scrutinize great painters over unorthodox timescales: nine weeks in the life of Vincent van Gogh, seven years of John Constable’s romance with his wife-to-be and around 250 hours which I spent sitting for a portrait by Lucian Freud.
New Book
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney records a less familiar side of the man described as the world’s most popular living painter: the record of a decade of conversations, A Bigger Message reveals Hockney as a highly insightful and original thinker on art.
For Hockney, drawing makes one ‘see things clearer, and clearer, and clearer still’; and with a characteristic passion and humour he outlines his views on not only his own works but the nature of creativity as a whole.
Taking in landscapes as diverse as California and Yorkshire, and moving fluidly between Hockney’s own life and the wide scope of art history, A Bigger Message’s discursive form continues to probe at the challenges and delights which accompany the representation of a three dimensional world on a flat surface.
In January 2012, The Royal Academy will host A Bigger Picture, David Hockney’s first new exhibition of major landscape paintings.