Yes, but the trees in the Bayeux Tapestry are all the same, aren’t they? It’s not about the seasons, really. What about the Bayeux Tapestry interested you?
That was like Van Gogh-everything was clear, everything was marvellous. And we watched a sunset there, with the sun behind, lighting up everything, and it was a fantastic experience to have. We got there in about six hours, including the Channel. We will just go.” And so we came to Honfleur. We won’t stay in London because there were too many people coming around. And I said to JP, “Why don’t we just go to Normandy? It’s easy to get to. We’d come for that window in Westminster Abbey, the one I made for the Queen, with all the hawthorn blossoms in it. Our conversation has been condensed and edited. “What was it I just read from Alexander Pope? For some people, health is no better than the most tedious disease,” he said. Hockney hadn’t been feeling well the previous day, and McGilvray was calling to check in. His longtime friend Bing McGilvray appeared. Hockney opened the cover and set the screen to easel mode. Midway through our visit, as we sat in his studio, the device buzzed with an incoming call. His trusty iPad-whose cover is smeared with paint-accompanies him wherever he goes. At eighty-four, Hockney is frailer than he once was, but his vigor waxes as he discusses his thoughts about art. While we ate a lunch of sea bass with creamy sauce Normande, Hockney played us a recording of a lecture on Picasso he’d given, in 1984 it was now posted on the Web site of the Guggenheim Museum, and Hockney was thrilled to see his ideas freely available online. Enlarged prints of iPad paintings of the interior-a hearth, a windowed door-were hanging near their real-life models. Wearing a houndstooth suit and a bright-yellow tie, Hockney received us in his home’s large living area, which is framed by two stone chimneys.
#Paintbrush display crossword series#
By the time we arrived, though, he was already in the beginning stages of a new project, a series of portraits on canvas. It was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry, a medieval embroidery depicting the Normans’ conquest of England, which is housed in a museum not far from Hockney’s home. A selection of lusciously enlarged prints was exhibited at London’s Royal Academy of Arts last summer, in a show titled “The Arrival of Spring.” A more recent exhibit of iPad paintings, at Paris’s Musée de L’Orangerie, presented a yearlong chronicle of the seasons, from springtime to a rare snowy day.
In 2020, he began drawing on his iPad every day, documenting the grounds’ poplar and fruit trees as their first blossoms appeared. I had visited the previous year as well, and, in the time since, a gate and an intercom had been installed at the entrance, to keep out the Hockney fans who trek to the property almost daily in hopes of meeting him.Īfter thirty-five years in sunny California, Hockney found fresh inspiration in the Norman landscape’s dramatic seasonal changes. A few days after Christmas, I drove with my husband, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, and our daughter, the writer Nadja Spiegelman, along the narrow, tree-lined roads leading to the home. Hockney has spent the pandemic almost entirely at the house, but he has remained remarkably connected to the outside world, organizing museum shows, taking calls from friends, and restlessly pursuing new avenues for his work. On the mezzanine, Hockney’s longtime assistant Jonathan Wilkinson set up a large-format, twelve-color printer. Gonçalves de Lima took the lead in restoring the property, converting a cider-press building into a skylit art studio. A traditional, low-ceilinged house surrounded by outbuildings, it sits beside a river amid gently rolling hills.
They first saw the home in 2018, during an impromptu visit to the area, and they were so enamored that they made an offer to buy it on the spot. From a seventeenth-century cottage in France’s Normandy region, Hockney has spent the pandemic restlessly pursuing new avenues for his work.įor the past three years, David Hockney and his longtime partner, Jean-Pierre (JP) Gonçalves de Lima, have lived in a remote seventeenth-century cottage in France’s Normandy region.
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