David Hockney seems to have been in the background or somewhere about ever since I decided to become an artist in the 1960s. The first ever etching I made was of a Typhoo Tea packet. "Just do something", I was told. I thought if Hockney could make something interesting out of a Typhoo Tea image, so could I. I wonder where those prints went? Of course he had got there first but we all need to get some sort of leg up when we get started. It was the fact he was working class that endeared him to me. He wasn't from an arty family, and he had enough confidence in himself to go where only the rich, posh boys used to go. If Hockney could escape Bradford, I could escape Dudley.
He could draw and draw well. Frank Lisle had taught him when he was a student in Bradford and it was Frank, the then college principal who ran the rule over myself when I pitched up at the Jacob Kramer College in Leeds. Frank insisted that all his staff had to be able to draw; not long after I started he sat in on a life drawing class I took, telling me afterwards what I had done wrong, what I had missed and what he thought I had done well. However he saw enough to keep me on as a part-timer. Frank would make all the staff draw from the model, he liked to test people out and he was very wary of any staff who couldn't draw as well as he expected. This attitude forced me to draw more and improve on my basic ability, which wasn't really that good. I was never a 'natural' drawer, but I did know that if you persisted at it you could get better. After all these years I'm still practicing, each week finding out something else about either myself or the world around me, things that you can only grasp through drawing. I can imagine Frank setting Hockney some hard tasks, but I'm also sure Hockney would have surprised Frank with his ability. Frank would have made an impression on the young Hockney. He only had one eye and wore an eyepatch, rather like a pirate, he was a commanding figure and had a military air. He fitted his role as principal very well, somehow he had fused his military and artistic personas, accuracy in drawing being a training that would also equip you as a rifleman.
Hockney turned up at Newport once when I was a DipAD student. I think it was John Selway that brought him in, they had both been at the Royal College at the same time. Selway back in the 60s being perhaps the more successful young artist but a return to Wales didn't do his career any favours. I remember Hockney showing us a drawing whereby a big plant obscured the feet of the model, he laconically told us he put the plant there because he didn't like drawing feet. I don't remember much else, I think I had a hangover that day, I did tend to drink far too much in those days. I was also going through a very conceptual phase in my work and had decided that Hockney was rather old fashioned, so I was not in a very receptive mood when he came. More fool me.
The first exhibition that I had work in that Hockney did too was New Art in Yorkshire, which was held in Leeds in 1987. New Art in Yorkshire was something that emerged out of the workings of the Yorkshire Contemporary Art Group and was spearheaded by James Hamilton, who had recently taken over what had been the Park Square Gallery in Leeds. I was part of the organising group and had been asked to become one of the selectors. The others, if I remember rightly, were Sutapa Biswas, whose 'Housewives with Steak-Knives' image had recently gone viral and Joanna Mowbury, who had just completed the first sculpture focused residency for the Artist in Industry project and had just held a well received one person show of the work she had completed as part of that residency. Alongside them I felt like I often do as if I didn't belong, my impostor syndrome kicking in big time.
Moving to Yorkshire meant that I was constantly reminded of Hockney's presence, even though he had moved over to the States to live, he was seen in Yorkshire as an ever present icon. At one time I was asked to comment about his work on a TV program, I think it was 'Look North', I was asked about the artistic worth of his drawings for a new telephone directory cover; in those days it was big news him getting engaged in such things. I thought it was wonderful that he could still have an obvious fondness and affection for the area and that I thought he was working in the tradition of Raoul Dufy. Not that hardly any of the viewers would have known who Dufy was.
The older I got the more I looked again at Hockney's work and in fact as I have just had work on exhibition at Salt's Mill, I spent quite a lot of time recently re-looking at his art and it doesn't disappoint. They still have in Salt's Mill his fax machine work done in the same year as the telephone directory.
