A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney

(Paperback)

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Description

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

David Hockney's exuberant work is highly praised and widely loved, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. In this now classic book, filled with anecdote, insight, passion and wit, Hockney reveals the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface. Compiled from a decade and a half of conversations with art critic Martin Gayford, it reflects a period in which Hockney relocated from Los Angeles to his native East Yorkshire. Their exchanges communicate the immense delight and inspiration that Hockney finds in the changing seasons and natural splendours of this sparsely inhabited corner of England - a delight that is, in the words of Margaret Drabble, 'an invitation to us all to look better, see better, enjoy more'.

Reviews

'A remarkable picture of Britains greatest living artist' - Daily Telegraph
'Elegantly and simply written' - Observer
'A rewarding book that turns out to be far more than simply the story of how and why Hockney made his most recent pictures. It offers a series of snappy essays on the complicated act of looking' - Times Literary Supplement

Author Bio

Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include Spring Cannot be Cancelled and A History of Pictures, both with David Hockney; Man with a Blue Scarf (in which he recounts the experience of being painted by Freud); Modernists and Mavericks; 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), all published by Thames & Hudson.