The David Hockney Show

It’s not every day that you get to share a room with an art legend like David Hockney… Which is why I was just one of several hundred people crammed into an upstairs room at the Royal Academy today to hear the 74-year old painter reveal plans for a major solo exhibition at the gallery in January. TV crews, broadsheet reporters, minor celebs (well, Newsnight’s Mark Lawson) and even a few curious fellow Academicians craned their collective ears to hear him speak, hoping for some wisdom and insight into this most fascinating of visual artists.

We’ll have a full report and interview in the November issue but I think it is worth just saying now what great fun Hockney was. Press briefings are notoriously dry affairs but once the show was put in context by the curators, the woman from the Cultural Olympiad had added her bit and we’d had a word from the sponsors (BNP Paribas, since you asked), the stage was set for the David Hockney Show.

Rather than avoiding questions or acting mock-bashful as is the usual artist stance, he launched straight into a rant about the way we wrongly say the exhibition’s launch date – it’s not two-thousand-and-twelve, it’s twenty-twelve he reasoned, pointing out that the Battle of Hasting took place in ten-sixty-six, not one-thousand-and… Well, you get the picture.

From here we were treated to joyous tributes to his native Yorkshire, a wildly fascinating explanation about his new nine-camera video making and several diversions into the joys of smoking (We’re all going to die anyway, he noted drily). If he was feeling the pressure of taking over Lucian Freud’s mantle of Britain’s greatest living artist, he didn’t let it show.

The short hour we all spent huddled in his company was a reminder that in some special cases being creative isn’t something that you can turn on and off, it’s a unstoppable torrent that pours out at all times.

- Steve Pill, Editor