From the Archive: Fans and Friends on the Genius of David Hockney

I used to stay with him in Bridlington, and there you saw his level of work is ferocious, daunting. When he was working on all those big paintings—which were exhibited in A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in 2012—he would get everybody up to have a cup of tea while it was still dark. His argument was, the sun doesn’t wait for you. That’s what his life is.

Zandra Rhodes

David became a cult figure at the Royal College, but that’s probably because he was already selling work. He was a third year when I was a first year, and when I decided to do a whole thing on pop art and medals, it was really from looking at his A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style. As well as the motifs, it had that sort of painterly approach.

The most interesting thing is the way he thinks. His mind is so alive, and it’s as alive now as it ever was. I think the secret to continuing to work over the years is that you love what you do and that you tend to mix with people who also love their work. That’s certainly true of David. If you spend your time with him, all you talk about is art.

Vic Reeves

Hockney’s always messing with people’s expectations. Early on he did very grey paintings of Yorkshire, a sort of ironic image he was playing up for the rest of the world, but then later he did those hugely vibrant pictures of Garrowby Hill, with fabulous winding roads that look like they could be in California but are in fact in Yorkshire. His compositions are sublime: there’s a grandeur that is almost religious.

You’ve got to use what you’ve got, use the world you live in. When I was at art school, he was doing his photomontages, and it was like a complete reinvention of cubism. He got an iPad and it becomes his art. If you’re always coming up with new ideas, you’re always going to be in fashion somewhere.

Manolo Blahnik

I’d grown up with Francis Bacon, all these brutal, beautiful things. Hockney had something else, which was fantasy. I’d never seen such freedom and novelty and freshness in England. I was mad about the costumes and sets he designed for The Magic Flute at Glyndebourne in the late ’70s. Maybe it was partly because I adore Mozart, but they were so whimsical, and so wonderfully made. The images were everything I like: dancing girls and boys with garlands of flowers, reminiscent of the illustrations any child of the ’40s or ’50s would remember, but beautifully executed.

The Rake’s Progress was wonderful, too. The sets were cross-hatched in green and red, with a beautiful temple and beautiful trees—even the fringes of the curtains were wonderful. Somehow he managed to capture the fluidity of Stravinsky’s music, and I even designed some criss-cross shoes based on the sets. I also used some of the wonderful colors from his Magic Flute: olive green and moss green, lettuce green and forest green. There’s one thing I’ll always regret: Hockney did a drawing of me at Mr Chow’s, in a sketchbook that belonged to Michael Chow. I said to a friend of mine, “Do you think you can get me that page?” But it never happened. Maybe before I drop dead, I’ll ask him to do it again.