A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney
The bestselling book of conversations between David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford as they explore the nature of creativity.

David Hockney is possibly the world’s most popular living painter, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art.

This now classic book details the fruits of his lifelong meditations 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 different media—from a Lascaux cave wall to an iPad—have for the way we see? What is the relationship between the images we make and the reality around us? How have changes in technology affected the way artists depict the world?

The conversations in this volume with writer and art critic Martin Gayford are punctuated by wise and witty observations from both parties on numerous other artists—Van Gogh or Vermeer, Caravaggio, Monet, Picasso—and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of California, where Hockney lived for many years, and Yorkshire, his birthplace. Some of the people he has encountered along the way—from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Billy Wilder—also make entertaining appearances in the dialogue.


1100871547
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney
The bestselling book of conversations between David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford as they explore the nature of creativity.

David Hockney is possibly the world’s most popular living painter, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art.

This now classic book details the fruits of his lifelong meditations 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 different media—from a Lascaux cave wall to an iPad—have for the way we see? What is the relationship between the images we make and the reality around us? How have changes in technology affected the way artists depict the world?

The conversations in this volume with writer and art critic Martin Gayford are punctuated by wise and witty observations from both parties on numerous other artists—Van Gogh or Vermeer, Caravaggio, Monet, Picasso—and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of California, where Hockney lived for many years, and Yorkshire, his birthplace. Some of the people he has encountered along the way—from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Billy Wilder—also make entertaining appearances in the dialogue.


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A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

by Martin Gayford
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

by Martin Gayford

Paperback

$19.95 
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Overview

The bestselling book of conversations between David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford as they explore the nature of creativity.

David Hockney is possibly the world’s most popular living painter, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art.

This now classic book details the fruits of his lifelong meditations 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 different media—from a Lascaux cave wall to an iPad—have for the way we see? What is the relationship between the images we make and the reality around us? How have changes in technology affected the way artists depict the world?

The conversations in this volume with writer and art critic Martin Gayford are punctuated by wise and witty observations from both parties on numerous other artists—Van Gogh or Vermeer, Caravaggio, Monet, Picasso—and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of California, where Hockney lived for many years, and Yorkshire, his birthplace. Some of the people he has encountered along the way—from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Billy Wilder—also make entertaining appearances in the dialogue.



Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780500298350
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Publication date: 05/13/2025
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud; Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters; A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen and Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy, both with David Hockney; Shaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, with Antony Gormley; Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939-1954, with David Dawson; Venice: City of Pictures; and How Painting Happens (and why it matters).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Turner with an iPhone 6

1 A Yorkshire paradise 12

2 Drawing 34

3 The trap of naturalism 42

4 The problems of depiction 54

5 A bigger and bigger picture 64

6 Scale: a bigger studio 76

7 Seeing more clearly 82

8 Drawing on a telephone and in a computer 88

9 Painting with memory 101

10 Photography and drawing 114

11 Garavaggio's camera 126

12 Way our west: space exploration 136

13 Gleaning Claude 146

14 Movies and moving through the landscape 156

15 Music and movement 166

16 Van Gogh and the power of drawing 182

17 Drawing on an iPad 191

18 The power of images 201

19 Theatre 207

20 Lighting 216

21 Nine screens on Woldgate 229

22 The arrival of spring 236

23 Winter 244

24 La Gomedie humaine 254

25 Finishing a picture 270

26 The studio 278

David Hockney's life and work 289

Further reading 293

List of illustrations 295

Note on the text 299

Acknowledgments 300

Index 301

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