Everybody looks, but some people look harder than others,” said David Hockney during a live Q&A session, screened to a packed audience at the Phoenix Picturehouse.

Speaking from his studio in Los Angeles, surrounded by recent canvases exploring perspective, Hockney trounced his critics with disarming charm.

“I don’t care what anyone says. Don’t take a blind bit of notice,” Hockney declared, lighting his third cigarette. “It’s like my dad said: ‘That’s aristocratic, not working class.’”

From the backstreets of Bradford to the palm trees of LA, Hockney has never stopped working.

“He’d draw on anything. A bus ticket stub, the side of a newspaper, the back of an envelope. You see, he saw things his own way – a way no one else did,” his sister Margaret recalled.

Walking with Hockney in his garden in LA, the film maker Randall Wright described Hockney stooping to pick a tiny flower.

“He gazed at it intently. Then he said: ‘I’ve not seen that blue for ages.’”

Walking through the Angel and Greyhound Meadow in St Clements after heavy rain, the brambles and grasses were bent and browning, while the grass was sodden underfoot.

Looking at the curling leaves of dying vegetation, I tried to look harder.

It’s true. In every leaf which appeared one colour, there were others present: yellow, red, even a bluish tone on a stem.

When Hockney got a colour TV, he delighted in turning up the contrast and ratcheting up the colour.

“Look, Fauvism on ITV,” he told a friend.

Living in LA combined not only the excitement of the US but had the Mediterranean “thrown in”.

It was also the home of Hollywood. Hockney’s eyes are always on new ways to convey the visual medium: films, TV, opera sets, colour copiers, iPods and iPads. Hockney has experi-mented with all of them.

“I liked the irony of a standard piece of office equipment being used creatively,” Hockney said of his early mini-copier.

Some years ago in Yorkshire, I was visiting Saltaire, a Victorian model village built by mill owner Sir Titus Salt and now a World Heritage site. Salt’s Mill, long neglected, was bought by Hockney’s friend Jonathan Silver. They’d met in Jonathan’s father’s Wimpy Bar in Bradford, and stayed friends for more than 40 years.

Puccini’s Turandot was playing loudly. Hockney had designed the sets for a recent New York production. “If anyone complains, I turn it up,” Silver said. Then the fax began to whirr. Sheet after sheet appeared. Silver spread them on the floor. “Hockney,” Silver said.”‘Can’t the man sleep?”

Describing his “cheeky and warm” friend, after Silver’s untimely death from cancer in 1997, Hockney wrote: “He was a kind of operatic king.

“He created his own world, lived in it and shared it with a lot of people.”

Now walking around Oxford, I shall look – and look harder. Hockney has taught me that.

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