A Bigger Message: Conversations With David Hockney
David Hockney is described as the world’s most popular living painter. Here, in Gayford’s record of nearly a decade of conversations, he emerges as something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. From California to Yorkshire and through anecodote, discussion and reflection, both artist and critic reveal how, in Hockney’s words, drawing makes one ‘see clearer, and clearer, and clearer still’.
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Man with a Blue Scarf
Lucian Freud, perhaps the worlds leading portrait painter, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. Gayford describes the process chronologically, from the day he arrived for the first sitting through to his meeting with the couple who bought the finished painting.
The Yellow House
Two artistic giants. One small house. From October to December 1888 a pair of largely unknown artists lived under one roof in the French provincial town of Arles. Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh ate, drank, talked, argued, slept and painted in one of the most intense and astonishing creative outpourings in history.
Constable in Love
Love not landscape was the making of Constable . . . John Constable and Maria Bicknell might have been in love but their marriage was a most unlikely prospect. Constable was a penniless painter who would not sacrifice his art for anything, while Maria’s family frowned on such a penurious union.