Bigger Message by Martin Gayford

The bestselling book of conversations between David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford as they explore the nature of creativity.

David Hockney’s exuberant work is highly praised and widely loved, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. In this now classic book, filled with anecdote, insight, passion and wit, Hockney reveals the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface. Compiled from a decade and a half of conversations with art critic Martin Gayford, it reflects a period in which Hockney relocated from Los Angeles to his native East Yorkshire. Their exchanges communicate the immense delight and inspiration that Hockney finds in the changing seasons and natural splendours of this sparsely inhabited corner of England – a delight that is, in the words of Margaret Drabble, ‘an invitation to us all to look better, see better, enjoy more’.

The bestselling book of conversations between David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford as they explore the nature of creativity.

About the Author: Martin Gayford is a writer and art critic. His books include Spring Cannot be Cancelled and A History of Pictures, both with David Hockney; Man with a Blue Scarf (in which he recounts the experience of being painted by Freud); Modernists and MavericksShaping the World: Sculpture from Prehistory to Now, with Antony Gormley; Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939-1954, with David Dawson; Venice: City of PicturesHow Painting Happens (and why it matters), all published by Thames & Hudson.

03 Apr 2025
 

A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford ISBN 9780500298350