Thames & Hudson presents A Bigger Message Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford.
Sparky, illuminating and entertaining – a decade’s worth of conversations between David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford that explore via anecdote, reflection, passion and humour the very 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. Here are 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 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 spent many years, and Yorkshire, the birthplace to which he has returned. Some of the people he has encountered along the way – from Henri Cartier-Bresson to Billy Wilder – make entertaining appearances in the dialogue.
Martin Gayford has been art critic for the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph and is currently chief art critic for Bloomberg News. He is the author of the acclaimed books The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles, Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter and Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, also published by Thames & Hudson.
ISBN 9780500238875
22.90 x 15.20 cm
Hardback
248pp
161 Illustrations, 154 in colour
First published 2011
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