Esteemed Artist David Hockney, 86:‘When I Am in My Studio, I Feel 30’

In short, he’s recently created a vast number of artworks across genres and mediums. Then again, nothing new about that. When I met David Hockney 40 years ago — progressing from assistant, to collaborator, now lifelong friend — he was already famous. His acclaimed acrylic paintings of the 1960s and ’70s, as well as his prolific work in drawing and printmaking during those years, were even then considered iconic, with many now housed in great museum and private collections around the world. But David has never been one to rest on his laurels, nor one to repeat himself: He has always made it clear to me that he has no use for nostalgia. “There is only now,” he likes to say, and that belief has long animated his art-making success across an astonishingly wide spectrum of media, for more than seven decades.

Pop star Harry Styles posed for Hockney in Normandy in 2022.

© David Hockney, Jonathan Wilkinson, Collection of the artist

It’s true that his oeuvre is largely still lifes, portraits (of people and his dogs), and landscapes, and he returns to them time and again. He will be forever twinned with his Southern California–inspired swimming pool landscapes and portraits. But even as he returns to familiar ground, it’s always been in fresh and forward new ways, such as in the 2010s with the then-new medium of the iPad and iPhone, with which he continues to make art to great acclaim. Hockney has also long been an innovator in printmaking, whether it be his Pools series of the late 1970s (using dyed paper pulp) or his Home Made Prints (made in multiple layers on a color photocopier) in the 1980s.

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He has incessantly toyed with photography, beginning with his cubist-inspired Polaroid assemblages and photo collages of the 1980s, through his more recent 3D digital photograph drawings and digital films using nine digital cameras.

And he has long and famously refocused his creative eye on designing for the operatic stage: One of his earliest productions — the set and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at England’s Glyndebourne Festival in 1975 — has been regularly presented there for nearly a half a century. Just this summer, 48 years after its premiere, David attended several performances.

Through all this, like all masters, he has occasionally been raked over the coals by critics. The Guardian called his Bigger & Closer “an overwhelming blast of passionless kitsch.” But David lets any criticism fly off him, and occasionally even thumbs his nose, while his adoring fans, of course, vote with their feet: Bigger was so successful that its run in London — originally scheduled to run through June, has been extended until the end of this year.

At this writing, David is back in London painting landscapes and portraits in his Kensington studio. He remains an unapologetic smoker and suggests people worry less and “laugh a lot — it clears the lungs.” Yes, he concedes his hearing loss makes him want to go out less, and he recently swapped his bathtub for a walk-in steam room — jokingly telling me he knows he could get into the bath but is not sure if he could get back out.

David Hockney self portrait with Charlie Scheips.

© David Hockney / Richard Schmidt National Portrait Gallery, London

Still, he has strong ideas on how to remain an age defier and keep moving forward: “When I’m not in the studio, I feel my age,” he says. “But when I am in my studio, I feel 30.” And besides work, the key, it seems, is captured on the pin with his motto that he always affixes to his custom-tailored suits: “Love Life.”