David Hockney

by Christopher Simon Sykes

  Even in the hallowed atmosphere of St. George’s Hall, Hockney still developed a reputation for being a “character.” Philip Naylor remembers that “David would somehow always contrive to be late, arriving after the orchestra and sometimes even after the conductor. The audience used to cheer and applaud him because, even if they didn’t know him, he was a feature of the town.”51

  The friends also used to regularly convene for parties at Derek Stafford’s new studio in Manningham Lane, just off the main road to Saltaire. Stafford was only ten years older than his students, but they were in awe of his sophistication. “It was like a bolt from the blue, somebody like that turning up at Bradford College,” Dave Oxtoby recalls. “His whole attitude was refined.”52 They discussed the theory of art, and the latest exhibitions, and he introduced them to cheap French wine, which was much harder to come by in those days, and which none of them had ever tasted. “They used to go down and vomit in my bath,” Stafford remembers, “and I would have to clear up the mess the next day, but they were great evenings and we all got on like a house on fire.”53

  Occasionally they discussed politics, more likely than not prompted by Hockney’s father sounding off on one of his favourite rants. The figure of Kenneth Hockney preaching anti-war and anti-nuclear sermons from his soapbox was a familiar one in Bradford, particularly in Foster Square, and he got his son and his friends involved in helping with propaganda. Rod Taylor, a textile student, had a cellar with a screen-printing machine which he lent them to print posters. “I once saw David and Kenneth,” Mike Powell, a boyhood friend, remembers, “standing in Bradford’s Town Hall Square during a rag-day parade carrying large placards. David’s read “CHARITY IS HUMBUG IN A WELFARE STATE,” while Kenneth’s read “STOP THE WAR—CHRISTIANS SHOULD NOT BOMB CHILDREN.” Such were David’s leanings at that time. I saw him occasionally sporting a full khaki ‘Castro-style’ combat outfit complete with forage cap and red star, incongruously sitting on the top deck of the Eccleshill trolley bus. He quickly got the nickname ‘Boris’ in the village, Ken being referred to as Commissar Ken after placing the Daily Worker for sale at the local newsagent’s at his own cost.”54 But though Hockney supported his father’s anti-war views and those on nuclear disarmament, he couldn’t go along with his communist sympathies. “I was much more of an anarchist,” he says. “My father had a very rosy view of communism, but of course he’d never been to Russia. He was rather like Mr. Kite in the film I’m All Right Jack who, when Mr. Windrush asks him if he’s ever been to Russia, says, ‘Ah, Russia, all them cornfields and ballet in the evenings.’ That’s what my father thought.”55

  With the exception of Hockney, most of the boys had girlfriends, or were looking for girlfriends, and the group tried to set him up with a very pretty girl called Terri MacBride who was a regular at Derek Stafford’s parties. He showed little interest beyond taking her out on the occasional trip to the cinema, which his friends interpreted as being because his passion for his work overrode any interest he might have in sexual activity. It never occurred to any of them that he might be gay. “I probably always knew I was gay,” says Hockney. “I certainly wasn’t interested in girls, and I didn’t really have to pretend to be because there wasn’t much social pressure. I remember that when Paul got engaged, I thought, ‘That’s not for me,’ and I must have known then that I would never marry. If anyone had asked me if I was gay, I would just have got out of it. I didn’t really feel that normal anyway, because I’d begun to realise that my talent made me different.”56

  On Christmas Eve 1954, Laura wrote in her diary: “Dad posed for David most of the afternoon.” This was the start of Hockney’s first serious portrait in oils, a painting of his father, which took just under a month to complete. It was painted on an old canvas Kenneth had bought at a jumble sale, so Hockney had to paint over whatever was on it. His father was not an easy subject as he was incapable of sitting still, his insatiable curiosity always getting the better of him and causing him to question and comment on everything that was going on. Since he’d paid for the canvas and bought the easel, he felt he had the right to do this. “My father,” wrote Hockney, “… set the chair up for himself, and he set mirrors around so he could watch the progress of the painting and give a commentary. And he would say ‘Ooh, that’s too muddy, is that for my cheek? No, no, no, it’s not that colour’…and I’d say ‘Oh no, you’re wrong, this is how you have to do it, this is how they paint at the art school, and I carried on.’ ”57 Portrait of My Father is a touching and sensitive work, over which the ghost of Walter Sickert lingers, beautifully executed, painted in muted tones, his father seated in a chair, hands clasped and looking almost sheepishly at the floor.

  Hockney worked on the painting at home, mostly on Saturday afternoons when Kenneth had finished work, creating further chaos in the house and upsetting the orderly life of his brother John, who had just started working for Montague Burton, the tailors. “The sharing became difficult when David began painting in the attic,” wrote John. “He was very untidy. Clothes dropped where he got out of them, sometimes hiding a tube of paint which, when accidentally stood on, squelched over whatever had been lying there. This became the topic of typical brotherly arguments, David’s total lack of any consideration except for his painting and my own growing ego about having to look smart. The two opposed. It was never bitter, frustrating perhaps, but Mum and Dad were great moderators. It must have been very difficult for David whose world then was purely focused on painting and drawing, and mine thinking looking good was important.”58

  Portrait of My Father was finished towards the end of January 1955, and submitted, along with a small landscape of Hutton Terrace, to Leeds Art Gallery for their biannual Yorkshire Artists Exhibition. This was a prestigious event to which all the staff of the art college sent work, along with teachers from other local art schools. Much to David’s surprise, both pictures were accepted, though he didn’t bother to put a price tag on them as he thought no one would buy them. The exhibition opened on Saturday, 29 January. “Kitchen upset all morning,” Laura wrote that day, “—David sketching in it. He went off soon after lunch for the opening of the Exhibition at Leeds … Ken and I went. We were proud of David’s pictures; they looked quite at home amongst the others.”59 After his parents had gone home, David was approached by a man called Bernard Gillinson, a friend of Fred Lyle’s, who offered him £10 for the portrait, a considerable sum then. After checking with Kenneth that he was happy for the painting to be sold, Hockney accepted the offer and called Laura to tell her. “He rang me up and said, ‘Hello, Mum. I’ve sold my Dad.’ It was so funny the way he said it. He got £10, which was a fortune to him at the time. He was so proud.”60 It was his first sale and to celebrate he took all his friends to the pub. “That probably cost a pound,” he later wrote. “The idea of spending a whole pound in a pub seemed absurd, but with the rest of the ten pounds I got some more canvases and painted some more pictures.”61

  After passing the Ministry of Education intermediate exam at the end of 1955, Hockney decided to apply for a place at the Royal College of Art in London, a decision in which he was greatly influenced by Derek Stafford, who believed him to be the most talented student he had ever taught. But he had his own reasons too. “I knew that it would take me out of Bradford, and I wanted to leave Bradford because I scarcely knew of an artist who lived in Bradford.”62 So he devoted his last two summers there, 1956 and 1957, to preparing himself for this important step. He converted one of his father’s prams into a mobile art studio—an idea borrowed from Stanley Spencer, of whom he was a great admirer, aping his appearance, right down to the National Health glasses, fringed haircut and ubiquitous umbrella—and loaded into it all his oils and watercolours, brushes and pencils, his sketchbooks and canvases and his easel, to transport them around Bradford to paint. “I had become quite interested in Stanley Spencer,” he wrote. “… I knew he was regarded as a rather eccentric artist out of the main class of art both by the academics who
favoured Sickert and Degas, and by the abstractionists who dismissed him.”63 When Hockney’s brother Paul was doing his national service in 1956, stationed quite close to Spencer’s home in Cookham, Hockney asked him if he would go and ask for the painter’s autograph. So one evening in the early summer Paul set off on the bus from Maidenhead to Cookham, where he was directed by a passer-by to Spencer’s house.

  “I knocked on the door,” Paul recalls, “and it was soon answered by this little man wearing round rimless spectacles. He identified himself as Mr. Spencer and I told him that my brother was an admirer of his. He asked me to come in. The house wasn’t scruffy exactly, but there was junk all over the place, piles of papers and books and all sorts of things. I remember there were loads of mugs everywhere with the remains of tea in them, and plates with bits of bun and biscuit on them. He was wearing a little pullover with holes in it and paint all over it. He said, ‘You don’t mind if I carry on with my painting?’ On the wall he had this massive canvas. It was Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta and I remember thinking what a peculiar hat Christ was wearing. It was half finished, and he had these two stepladders and would go up one and put on a little paint and then come down and take a look, and then put some more on. He didn’t say much. Eventually he signed the book I’d brought and I left.”64

  Hockney soon became a familiar sight in Bradford, pushing the pram around the city looking for suitable subjects. He painted, among other subjects, street scenes, the interiors of shops, people sitting about in a launderette, a fish and chip shop, and his family sitting down to Sunday lunch in their best suits. “He was the first person I ever saw,” says Derek Stafford, “who painted semi-detached houses. But he took them on and he did remarkably interesting things with them. His subjects were carefully observed. He looked at his own environment and said, ‘This big city I live in may be grey and black, a dirty city, but there is a magic in it if I look at it closely,’ ”65 while Dave Oxtoby recalls, “There was a solidity, a weight, to David’s work at that time. Even his little drawings were very heavy, in particular some pictures of pubs on corners and things like that which were really solid. I remember also he did a painting once of the tram wires and the trees, and the break-up of the trees. He actually painted in between the branches with different colours, slightly different blues so that the branches would disappear and the difference in the blues carried the line of the branch as it went through. I thought the way he handled his paint then was really amazing. He was constantly trying new things.”66

  He experimented with colour and developed his own technique for doing his outdoor paintings. He found an unusual colour which he called “Indian yellow,” a synthetic dye that he would wash all over his board and work on while it was still wet, so that the underlying Indian yellow influenced every colour he painted into it. “It created a kind of homogeneous sensation over the landscape he was painting,” says Stafford. “It did work for him and he created some very interesting landscapes.”67

  The only restriction was the cost of paint, which was prohibitively high for all the students. When Hockney went to an exhibition of van Gogh at the Manchester City Art Gallery in 1956, what struck him most was how rich the artist must have been, to use a whole tube of blue to paint the sky, something that not even one of Hockney’s teachers could afford. He found novel ways of raising funds to buy paint, which also enhanced his reputation for being an eccentric. These included taking money in return for dares. “We’d go painting round the canal,” Dave Oxtoby remembers, “and come the end of the day David would say, ‘Give me sixpence and I’ll jump in the canal,’ and he’d jump in just to get some money.”68

  Depending on how many people were involved, the dares could prove quite lucrative. “David was painting with other students near the canal at Apperley Bridge,” Laura wrote in her diary one day. “During lunch hour they dared him to walk the edge of the Spring Bridge—he did it, but fell in at the end and came home dripping wet—but just in time for the last lot in the washer. He earned 10 shillings with his daring.”69

  At the beginning of 1957, Hockney took the Royal College of Art entrance exam and passed with flying colours. “Mr. Coleclough wishes me to convey to you his congratulations,” wrote his deputy. “He is delighted with your success.”70 Then, at the end of the summer term, he sat for the National Diploma in Design. For this he spent a week making a painting of a nude model, and he showed some of the pictures he had made of Eccleshill and its surroundings. The examiners were impressed enough to award him a first-class diploma with honours, and his painting, Nude, was picked for a travelling exhibition of art students’ work. He now waited anxiously for further word from the Royal College, which had required successful applicants to submit a portfolio of drawings, watercolours, lithographs, etc., along with a number of actual paintings. Hockney had sent life drawings, life paintings and figure compositions, and paintings he’d done at the art school and at home during the holidays. Just in case he failed the interview, he had also sent similar work to the Slade School. He was told there were three hundred people applying for the Royal College and thirty places available. He successfully passed the first hurdle, and was selected for interview.

  The interview process took two days, so students from the provinces had to stay at least one night in London. Applicants would spend the first day in the Life Room drawing a nude model, and on the second day would show these drawings, along with all the other work they had submitted, to the college professors. “I naturally thought I wouldn’t have much of a chance,” Hockney recalls, “because all the London people would be much better than me. You had to do a life drawing as part of the interview and I remember going round looking at the other people’s drawings and thinking to myself, ‘Well, I can do just as well as that. Maybe I will be OK.’ ”71

  At the end of the first day Hockney and Norman Stevens, who had also been selected, returned to the bed and breakfast off the Earls Court Road the college had recommended. In the hall they ran into Derek Boshier, a graduate student from Yeovil College of Art in Somerset and a fellow applicant. “I recognised David straight away from having seen him in the Life Room,” Boshier remembers, “because of his straight jet-black hair and the tweed suit he was wearing. He told me he had his interview the next day, and asked me rather sheepishly in his broad Yorkshire accent, ‘Do you think we’ll get in?’ ”72 Boshier had planned to cruise the streets of Earls Court looking for nightlife, but ended up going up to Hockney and Stevens’s room to discuss the interview and help them drink their way through the crate of Guinness they had bought. The following morning, a little woolly-headed, they walked back to the college buildings in Queen’s Gate to face the selection panel. “You had to lay out all your work on a table,” Hockney recalls, “which consisted of about six paintings, lots of drawings, including the life drawings of a nude, in front of a panel of old people. Actually it was very exciting.”73 The “old people” were the college professors: Carel Weight, the head of the painting department, who took centre stage, with Ruskin Spear, Roger de Grey, Colin Hayes, Ceri Richards and Rodney Burn, all distinguished artists, on either side of him. What Hockney did not know, and which was very much in his favour, was that Carel Weight was becoming increasingly disillusioned by the number of his students, such as Dick Smith and Robin Denny, who were turning to the abstract. He was deliberately looking for young artists who showed the figurative in their work. On the strength of what he saw, Weight decided to offer Hockney a place on the postgraduate course in painting.

  Hockney was also offered a place at the Slade, but his heart was set on the Royal College, whose offer he happily accepted.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DOLL BOY

  David Hockney and John Loker (illustration credit 3.1)

  “Before university … there was national service to be got through,” says Alan Bennett in his memoir, Writing Home, “regarded at best as a bore, but for me, as a late developer, a long-dreaded ordeal.”1 Just as this compulsory military service
, reintroduced in 1947, delayed Bennett’s going up to Oxford for two years, so it delayed David Hockney’s arrival at the Royal College of Art till September 1959. Like his father, Hockney registered as a conscientious objector, at a point when the authorities were taking a more relaxed view of ethical objectors. Hockney was told he would be called for interview in September 1957, and assigned suitable work in the community. But first there was a long summer of painting to enjoy.

  In Hockney’s last year at Bradford, he and John Loker decided to enter an annual competition, the David Murray Landscape Scholarship, named after the famous Scottish landscape painter. The prize was £48, and they made a deal that if one of them won it, they would share the prize money and go off painting together for the whole summer. Loker also agreed to put into the pot any winnings from his lunch-hour card games. Luck was with both of them: Hockney won the scholarship and Loker won at cards. With their mutual love of Constable, they settled on Suffolk as the best place to paint, and placed advertisements for accommodation in the local papers. Being young and impatient, however, they decided that they couldn’t waste time sitting around waiting for the replies to come in, but would head straight off for St. Ives in Cornwall, the centre of the thriving colony of artists headed by Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth.