Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews (5 page)

I rather crassly asked whether it was difficult being a relatively young woman – and an Arab to boot – in a business dominated by elderly white males. ‘I am proud of being an Arab. Some people may have their prejudices but they can’t help it,’ she said easily. ‘But there are two sides to everything. People surprise you by being so supportive.’

Even the notorious sexism of the construction industry she takes in her stride. ‘They can’t look at me in the face. They look at me here [pointing at her shoulder]. I say, “Why are you looking at my shoulder?” ’ She fixed me with her large brown eyes. If I were a developer I would have felt very small indeed.

However, it is not the chauvinism of developers that really vexes her, but their conservatism. ‘They become so fixated with a particular idea that when you produce another they think either it’s impossible or too expensive.’

Cautiously, I mentioned the Prince of Wales. She snorted. ‘The royal family cannot be critical of things when they built that gate. The Queen Mother’s Gate. Hideous.’

We ordered our puddings, and I pressed on, quizzing her about the high drama of the Cardiff opera house contest, which she won twice over, the first time meeting such hostility from the locals that she was asked to enter the competition all over again – much to the outrage of the architecture profession.

‘I didn’t take it personally. You have to be generous with people,’ she said. ‘Give them time and space to understand. The problem is that people in this country have seen so much garbage for so long they think life is a Tesco. When the highest aspiration is to make a supermarket, then you have a problem.’

She started to explain that what matters about a building is not what it is made of, or any of the details, but the space itself. ‘Good space transcends taste and values. It’s a weird, mystical thing. It’s very difficult to achieve, but you know when you’ve got it.’

I asked her to describe the Cardiff space. ‘It is a city of rooms. It has large rooms and small rooms. Different volumes. They stretch from linear to cubic to shadow. It is like a galaxy. You see objects suspended over your head. It flows like a river.’

I said it will be a great shame if these rivers, galaxies and cities never come into being, and if the Millennium Fund decides to finance a rival project for a tacky rugby stadium instead. We are doing our damnedest to do the best we can,’ she said. ‘We’ll see what happens.’

Our lunch had started late and it was well after 3.30 when we finally gathered ourselves up and left. The other lingering diners stopped and stared as Hadid swept out.

They might have stared even harder had she been wearing one of the outfits that she used to attach to herself with pins. However, these garments took several hours to take on and off, and she has no time for that now. She hailed a cab to take her back to the office, and invited me to visit next time I was passing. So not going abroad today? Quickly, she explained: ‘I was meant to be going to Brazil …’

22 NOVEMBER 2003

The artist tells the
FT
why he has given up on photography and turned to watercolours instead

By Christopher Parkes

David Hockney lives in a world of his own imagining, where laws bend to the artist’s will or whim. It comes accoutred with his rules of morality and manners, his principles of perspective, proportion and colour, and can be found in the space occupied by his home and gardens behind a scruffy boundary fence at the end of a dizzying drive to the very edge of the Hollywood hills. By ‘chopping up space’, a technique he applied to his opera stage sets, he has created a contiguous, benevolent environment where exterior and interior merge.

Down a gully, there’s an iconic pool with ripples painted on the bottom to amplify the effect of the gentler stirrings on the water’s surface. Up a facing slope, painted fishes dangle from a tree, swimming in their waterless aquarium.

Elevated walkways, decks, awnings and furniture adorned in Matisse’s brilliant palette of blues, reds, yellows and greens – ‘the colours of nature’, he says – enhance rather than affront the more muted tones of the crowded, semi-tropical landscaping. A hall of mirrors, a gallery, a giant’s paintbox stuffed with pencils and crayons; it is all Hockney.

His world even has its own private micro-climate – the smoke from his Camel filters that travels with him. Hockney is tickled by a
New York Times
picture of himself outside the gala opening of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. He is standing alone, his face barely visible through a wreath of smoke.

Over a lunch of sweet-glazed lamb chops and baked potatoes, prepared by his housekeeper, we are sharing a moan about how the petty restrictions on personal indulgence and busybody attitudes that nudged him out of his native England in 1978 have come to dog him in what-the-hell California.

‘We had some buttons made that said “End Bossiness Soon”,’ he says. ‘I wanted “End Bossiness Now”, but I knew that was asking a bit too much.’ He gives off a roar.

‘But I’m only talking about out there,’ he says, describing an overhead circle with his hand. Then, with a smaller rotation to encompass Hockney’s universe: ‘This is the real world and I paint it.’

He says he does not really care about what goes on outside. But that does not mean he is detached. Indeed, he ponders a good deal on what he calls ‘the bigger things happening’. To Hockney, who relates only to things visual, these include the loss of ‘veracity’ in photography, exemplified on his studio wall by clippings of the staged Second World War planting of the US flag on Iwo Jima, and a more recent example from the
Los Angeles Times
, depicting an extraordinary illustrated apology for the publication of a digitally doctored photograph from the war in Iraq.

‘Look at a photograph and you believe you are seeing something that once existed in time and space. That’s not now necessarily the case. You don’t need to believe a picture any more: it could be made up.

‘I haven’t figured out what that will do to us, but it will be something quite profound,’ he says.

He recalls a 1989 visit to ‘smoke-free’ Silicon Valley to preview Adobe PhotoShop software that facilitates the manipulation of digital pictures. On the way back, he remembers noting what he had seen meant the end for chemical photography and the darkroom artist.

One effect, he says, now that digital technology has taken the art out of it, and put the mouse/brush in the hand of any snapper with a laptop and a few bucks’ worth of software, could be that photography in all its forms may lose the position of cultural dominance it enjoyed in the 20th century.

He already knows how it has affected his world: those clippings mark the end of his involvement with the camera. The fate of his relationship with the medium was sealed, he says, during research for his last book,
Secret Knowledge
– an investigation of the old masters’ use of camera obscura and camera lucida in which the artist’s hand and eye are in essence integrated into an optical device, providing the focus and the means for preserving an image. His experiments with the format ended with a series of camera lucida drawings that spanned 1999 to 2001.

Last year, in his longest stay in London since he moved to California, he discarded mirrors, prisms and lenses and drew 25 portraits from life in the most productive sustained bout of painting in his career.

Those scraps of newspaper mark a decisive point in the life of an artist who experimented with photography to substantial acclaim for 20 years. The collage
Pearblossom Highway
,
1986
is one of his best-known pieces.

But it’s not good enough for him now. ‘I think the world is beautiful but we don’t know totally what it looks like or how to make pictures of it,’ Hockney says. ‘Photographs aren’t good enough. Frankly, they’re not real enough.’

Pounding away at his thesis, he mocks a recent software advertisement that claimed it could make an artist of anyone.

‘I had a good laugh at that. You can be an artist with a Bic pen!’

He is glad the copywriter recognized the importance of the human hand in art, even if it is holding a mouse.

‘But as the Chinese would say, you need three things: the eye, the hand and the heart. Two won’t do. Very wise, the Chinese.’

Which brings us back to another round of Camels and the first work he showed me in his studio an hour or so before: a small, smudgy reproduction of a 350-year-old Rembrandt drawing. Made in brown ink with a reed pen or possibly a sharpened stick, it shows a family group teaching a child to walk, sketched unaware, embraced by an aura of tenderness and attentiveness unmarred by the coarseness of the medium.

All Hockney said was: ‘You can’t do that with a photograph.’

Ignoring his sliver of angel cake, now lightly dusted with ash, he returns to his Rembrandt, devilled out of some dusty corner in the British Museum, and proclaims it a virtuoso piece. ‘It doesn’t shout “art” immediately. It shouts “humanity” first,’ he says.

We have rambled through fame, fortune, a dismissive exchange on charges that he is a mere illustrator or ‘the Cole Porter of figurative painting’ and we are unintentionally back with the ‘bigger things’.

Painting is in the dumps. Why? ‘Because they stopped teaching it,’ he says straight off.

At 16, Hockney went to art school in Bradford, Yorkshire, and spent four years learning drawing and being taught how to look and see before going to the Royal College of Art. ‘The destruction started in the early 1960s. I witnessed it at the Royal College. I used to argue and they said, “Oh, it’s David again – the old back-to-the-life-room story.” I said, “No, no, forward to the life room.” ’

The requirement that secondary-school students must obtain A-levels to be admitted to art colleges continued the insurrection. But nothing is forever. Now, he says, there are young people – perhaps even prompted by the potential of the computer – who realize the value of being taught rather than hoping for the best from trial and error.

Hockney continues to learn. His new portraits are executed in watercolour, a difficult medium he had not used previously.

‘I spent last year training my eyes not to see like a camera and, believe me, you’ve got to do a lot of work to achieve that,’ he says.

In his studio, a dozen or more portraits hang in various stages of completion. There is a light littering of cigarette butts on the floor and an abandoned, unplugged jogging machine. ‘I swim these days,’ he says.

Back at the table, I ask him what is left. ‘Oh, I’m painting now and it will grow. The more you understand what photography was, the more you begin to see that painting is necessary. I’ve got plenty to do but I’ve got to be left alone to do it quietly and I will. And I will show you what painting can do.’

He has already learnt that
Secret Knowledge
, recently published in Hungarian, its 12th language version, has given art historians and
students new avenues to explore. More importantly, it has opened a way forward for the autodidact Hockney.

‘I’m just beginning,’ he says. ‘[The book] led me back to the hand and back to the hand with a loaded brush.’ Just how loaded will be revealed at an exhibition of portraits and garden paintings planned for the Whitney Museum in New York in March 2004 and, to judge by the set of Hockney’s jaw, in years to come.

‘You can’t go on saying art is this, that and the other and ignore the deep desire to see images of ourselves,’ he says. ‘If drawing is 30,000 years old, do you think that just because some theoretician comes along in 1960 and says there’s no need for it, that we’ll forget it? It’s only a temporary disturbance. But then temporary things are disruptive,’ he says.

‘I’ll avoid New York for the next five years. There’s no bohemia there now, because bohemia is by definition tolerant of human frailty. It’ll come back. All we need is a bit of tension and we’ll all be smoking again.’