rent apartment furniture

put it around there. just turn it around a bit. that's it. bring it back around. there, that's nice. wait a minute, let me check - just let me turn the brush. there. good. david came to the college with this pinstripe suit, and a high starch collar and a very thin little tie, and this pudding bowl haircut. and i said to myself, "my god, look at the state of this fella!" i said, "he's like a russian peasant. a right boris."

you know those crinkly chippers? you see, he had a crinkly chipper, when chips used to be straight. he always had bloody theories about everything, you know? "here, well, there's more surface area. it makes a better chip." he had a need to have a guiding theory. when he decided he'd hit on the right one, it was like someone who's suddenly seen the light in a new religion. and you'd tend to dread meeting him and being subjected to it again.

it was always easy to get him on the subject of cigarettes. i asked him what he thought about this billboard, over on santa monica boulevard. right away, he says, "well, i should rent the billboard across the street... "..that would tell the number of people who died of other causes." i think he was a bit in love with me for a while. i do think that's true. i remember wearing this suit in san francisco and going up to nob hill, which is a very steep slope,

and he said, "celia, "those trousers from the back, "i don't think you look your best in those." and i never wore them again. we had this polar bear white carpet, and he was doing some ink drawings on the floor, and he got a spot of ink on the carpet, and my father got hysterical. i said, "dad, we should have him sign it.

"it'll be worth millions in a couple of years." this programme contains some strong language we go under the stairs, a little cupboard to hide under the stairs. when the bomb drops on the street, my mother screamed. if she screams, you scream. i mean, you're very frightened if your mother's frightened. so, it's something i've always remembered and, actually,

so had all my brothers and sister. it's the first... ..first memory i have, yeah. i was born in 1937, and i do remember the end of the second world war. i was brought up with rationing. they didn't end rationing till i was 16 years old, so, you couldn't just go and buy a bar of chocolate. you could only buy sweets saturday morning

when you got your pocket money. you would be given it at nine o'clock and the sweets had gone by 9.15. you'd bought them and eaten them and that was it, and you'd have to wait till another saturday. i mean, i was brought up in austerity like that. on the other hand, we didn't feel poor. life was interesting, you know? i mean, you're a kid, so life is interesting

whether you have much money or not. it's always interesting to children, in that way. it should be, anyway. and it was to my father. i mean, he... he wasn't a very sophisticated man, in many ways. i mean, he was a bit puritanical for me. but he had a heart. i mean, he cared about people, and felt there should be justice in the world. i mean, he was political that way.

- from a recording:- the one thing i loved, my father could paint the line on a crossbar of a bicycle using a special long brush. he'd rest your finger on the top, and then you do it without a ruler, you see? like a sign writer would. but to watch it done without a ruler was very thrilling, i thought. incredible that you could make a straight line like that,

just with your eye. i mean, it's like watching michelangelo draw a circle. why are you popular? what is it, do you think, in your work that goes straight through to the understanding and feelings of a large number of people? well... - ..i'm not that sure.- go on, try.- of course. i am interested in ways of looking, and trying to think of it in simple ways.

if you can communicate that, of course, people will respond. everybody does look, it's just a question of how hard they're willing to look, isn't it? we were at a restaurant and somehow the subject came up of david's failings and faults. henry took the napkin and wrote, just like that, as fast as you please. it's so funny, i picked it up and i've saved it ever since.

it started out, "stubborn", then "hard of hearing" was the next one. "generous to a fault", "emotional in the guise of reason". and "often overhardy". and he's written in parenthesis, "walking and bathing". and the other one is, which he's written is, "unintentionally rude", and he's underlined "unintentionally" twice. i think it's a really good description of david.

i've saved it for ever. one of the things that my father taught me was not to worry too much what the neighbours think. that's aristocratic, actually, not working class. that's aristocratic. i mean, "fuck you, i don't care what the neighbours think." and my mother would have cared, but kenneth told me that, "don't you worry too much what the neighbours think."

and i always thought, i took that lesson, actually, yeah. i noticed it. when he was at bradford art school, he was in an evening class, life drawing, and there was a guy, and bit of a sort rocker or something, and he had an art student girlfriend, probably with that sort of witch-type mascara that was about then. and they were real art students, and there was the schoolboy, you see, intensely drawing.

and he said this guy was just like this on his thing, and sort of putting his feet up on the donkey, you know, and all this, and just spent two hours taking the piss out of hockney for being so earnest and just drawing. and the girlfriend was laughing and the model was laughing. and i said, "what did you do?" he just said, "well..." he said, "well, i just thought, 'well, i'll fucking show them!'" and he had revealed the inner david, you know?

willpower. nobody was there when i arrived at the royal college and i just sort of got a cubicle they appointed me and i laid out my stuff and then suddenly this very strange-looking guy walks in and doesn't say a word, just starts setting up in the cubicle next to me. then derek boshier came in and took up the cubicle on the other side,

so there was derek on my left, and david on my right, and me in the middle, and we became quite friendly after a few weeks. he was living in a little hut in earls court, and i went there once or twice, but it was not very large. it barely fit the two of us in there. rock and roll music london in the '60s was becoming very hip, very different, also very anti-establishment. the atmosphere that i sensed in the cubicles that were surrounding me

was of experimentation. they wanted to experiment to find something different than what they knew and they weren't even sure what that was going to be. i think they were interested in america, definitely, but, strangely enough, i think it was the abstract expressionist painters and the anti-traditionalism of those artists that really intrigued the british painters. the main thing then was abstraction.

the abstract expressionists were very big, and so, by the end of my second year, i went to new york. somebody stopped me in the street and said they had this ticket for new york. and it cost â£40. and all i had to give them was â£10 now and i could have it if i gave the â£30 later. i thought it cost a â£1,000 to go to america.

i mean, i'd never thought of going to america, so, erm, i said ok. i only had about â£12, but i thought, "well, i'll get the money somehow." i think almost the next day this letter came with a cheque for â£100. i'd won a prize.

and then i started selling pictures for â£10, â£12, â£15. in the end, i went to america with about 350. and that was to last me for two months. jet plane engines whine i had a great time in new york then. i thought new york was the place to be. that was it, i thought.

i mean, it ran 24 hours a day then, absolutely did. siren wails advert: '..whipped cream on your head, 'but this is lady clairol whipped creme. 'it makes every bleach i've ever used old-fashioned.' 'it's the fabulous new way to be blonde, beautifully. 'lady clairol hair lightener whips instantly, never runs or drips...' i was living in my parents' home in long island in long beach. friends of mine, and david, were all in my house one evening

watching television and this ad came on. i don't even remember what we were watching, but this ad came on for clairol and saying, you know, "everybody should go blonde, because blondes have more fun." they all looked at it and they said, "wow. that sounds good." and they rushed out and bought clairol hair dye, and they were all sitting in my parents' living room dying their hair.

my father walked in and almost had a heart attack. "what the hell is going on here?!" but that's where david decided he was going to be blond for the rest of his life. is he still blond? lovely, aren't they? you can drop 'em on a stone floor and pick 'em up again... in pieces. give me eight and six for the half a dozen, darling.

eight shillings, half a dozen. right... he was always drawing, always, as long as i can ever remember. when he had little stubby fingers, he'd be drawing something. and he never stopped. and he didn't have paper like you have today, but you've got the edge of notebooks and things or... anything where there was a space. a bus ticket, even. so if he were on a bus, he'd have a pencil in his hand

probably drawing other passengers, things like that. sizzling sewing machine clicks the weight. oh, yeah. wow, the weight. when you think now, you can get it on kindle, can't you? she laughs yeah. ah, yes, this is the sort of thing. he would have been all excited

about who's done these and why have they done them, and, i mean, brilliant, especially when you go back with the history, as well. so, yes, this would have influenced him. you see, this was the only way you could see the world, wasn't it? i mean, there was cartwright hall in bradford with some pictures. by looking at pictures, he would realise, "i can do what i like," once you've seen these, can't you?

and it would give him the freedom to be an artist and be an artist who painted exactly what he wanted to paint, what he needed to paint. he'd be looking at these and looking at the techniques and why they did... he'd see it totally with his eye, which would be quite different to what the rest of us would see. badges. "good health is worth more than a fortune."

- give me one, will you?- put those in the car. - you're going to take 'em?- yep.- oh, are ya? do you remember the hens, the hens on the field up here before they built the houses? - oh, you'd only be ever so young.- oh, yes. on, er... well, i have that somewhere. it's framed. did you see anything, margaret? no, i can't find those cuff links.

'we used to live in steadman terrace during the war.' it was a small house and closed in. it was claustrophobic, actually, yes, and there were five of us. all right, we were only small, so that didn't matter too much. and it was at the top of a hill, and you couldn't... if it was dark, you couldn't see a thing anywhere. there was a lot of darkness from that house in my memory, so probably the same with david.

but i think the claustrophobia could have been a bit of emotional as well as space-wise. i know he always says he likes space. but you do need space from people as well, don't you? in fact, that is what space is, isn't it, actually? what else is space? being alone. music: l-o-v-e by nat king cole # l is for the way you look at me

# o is for the only one i see # v is very, very extraordinary... # within one week of coming here, i'd never driven before, i'd got a driving licence, bought a car, got a studio and i thought, "this is the place." it's got all the energy of the united states with the mediterranean thrown in, which i think is a wonderful combination. camera shutter clicks

david took some snapshots, he took polaroids, of me standing in front of the bar room, and i was dusting some of the heads, cos i had a lot of animal heads. my first husband was a great white hunter. gunshot and david only took about three black and white polaroids. i said, "oh, david, how can you work from black and white?" "oh," he said, "i can only work from black and white photographs,

"because the colour of photography is never the same as real life." anyway, so i took the pictures and i said, "there's only one thing you could call this painting, "since i'm dusting. "it's called beverly hills housewife." sprinklers swish some people will say, "well, la is a good place to hide." you can calve out a private life here for yourself, if you wish, and a lot of people do that.

because of the kind of set-up of the city and everything, people don't walk here, they take cars. and david's had this place here for many years, but he wasn't part of a community like venice or downtown la. but he just managed to get around, all over the city. i know that he would like to go out on rides, you know, driving way out in the country, and i think he's done that several times, too.

- i'll be there.- over phone: 'ok. yeah, a guy came. 'he was asking about you earlier. 'he may try to reach you...' - all right, love.- 'see you later.'- bye. - tv:- 'my daddy promised me a horse all for myself 'when i got here from back east. 'he said, "a boy needs a horse to love and if it's the right boy, '"the horse will learn to love him, too."' western music

- there he is.- boy, he's a beauty. no wonder he's the king of the wild herd. i've just gotta get him today. that's for sure, bob. we can't disappoint that kid of yours. he's coming in on the 4.59... 'when i arrived here, somebody said, '"well, why have you come to this cultural desert?" 'well, i didn't think it was a cultural desert, 'because i knew hollywood was here.'

come on, boys. come on. my father loved the cinema. so did we as kids and, remember, i'm about the last generation brought up without television. i was 18 years old when we first got television, so my childhood was radio and things. but we loved the pictures. they were always called "the pictures". not "the movies", not "the cinema", "the pictures".

"can we go to the pictures?" they had a powerful effect on me, you know. we used to go in the side entrance and, of course, there was a lavatory down there with an exit and kids used to go and open it. little kids'd run in free, you know, doing that. i used to tell 'em, "if you walk in backwards, they'll think you're coming out." and i would point this out, though.

probably because you were sitting near the front, the edges of the screen seemed unimportant. they were miles away, you thought they were absolutely miles away. whereas now i'm very, very aware of the edges of the screen often making a pokey picture. but at that time, i never thought any picture was pokey, because it was offering you another world from dingy bradford. remember, you're walking through dingy streets to a little local cinema and when you come out,

you've been all over, you've been in the french revolution or somewhere, so you come out with your imagination working. it was pictures, pictures, pictures! gunshots i've always said, in a way, i was brought up in hollywood and bradford, because most of the films we saw were american when i think of it. i went to the cinema a lot and we'd go home on the bus. i'd always go upstairs to the front of the bus.

i always travelled upstairs on the bus, always on the front seat, so you could see more. i always wanted to see more. i, erm, was coming back from new york and i'd bought, in new york, some nudist magazines, some male nudist magazines, and at the airport, the customs man, who was about 22 years old, opened the bag and they sorted out the magazines. if they were completely nude, he put them on one side

and if they were not quite nude, he put them on another side and then they kept the nude magazines. i protested and said, "oh, come on, don't be silly. "just give me them back," and this, that and the other and they took them away, and i kept phoning up the customs office in the city and i kept speaking to a man, i don't know what his name was, mr hittet, hillet or something. he said, "oh, they are definitely pornographic."

he'd looked through and in one of the photographs, the boys had painted their genitals with psychedelic colours. and i just didn't... i just didn't know what to say to somebody who didn't think that was amusing or funny. then, erm... ..in the end, i had to get a lawyer and i showed him magazines of a similar kind, and the moment the lawyer wrote the letter to them, they immediately came back.

a man appeared on the doorstep in a peaked cap with a big envelope marked "on her majesty's service" and said, "you know what these are," and handed them in. david became particularly intrigued at the royal college of art because i had a lot of magazines like american model guild and physique pictorial stuck up in my cubicle, and this fascinated him, of course. i was very out already in new york, despite the fact that it was the '60s

and i had a lot of trouble being out and i'd been beaten up several times by, you know, anti-gay homophobes, but i just didn't care. i thought, "well, you know, england is probably ok, "nobody cares there about this sort of stuff." and he was intrigued to meet somebody who was so out, because i don't think he knew anybody at that point who was quite out and so we became very close friends. a couple of times i've shared a bed with hockney,

and once was i was stuck for somewhere to kip. has anyone ever mentioned his five-foot tall turquoise teddy bear that he had? he laughs this fucking great teddy bear from here to the wall. with big eyes, it had, and it was turquoise sort of fluff. so this went down the middle of the bed, you see, between sort of, like, straights and gays, if you know what i mean.

i was this side, you see, and this fucking great teddy bear... you couldn't even see david, and then the next morning, we both woke up and david sort of does this sit-up in bed above this turquoise teddy bear. no glasses, you see, and he sort of goes, he sort of goes like this, you know. he sort of goes... - in yorkshire accent:- "hello!"

the paintings all related, whether superficially or intensely, on his life and his trying to deal with his homosexuality and trying to deal with his fantasies and trying to deal with the issues of a sexual identity. he used wit to play with these identities. he was really like a little high-school girl about it, really. i mean, it was all fantasy and some sort of cutesy stuff. i mean, like his fantasies about... who was that rock singer?

..cliff richard. i don't think he had had sex at any point yet with a man, but i think he certainly fantasised a lot about it. with david, it was probably something about a way to get out something about himself, but i don't know if that was the core of the painting, because, you know, it's not just pictures of men fucking. there's something much more in there.

and homosexuality, it's sort of a witty side issue. even if it seems to be the subject of the painting, it's not the subject of the painting. if anything, the homosexual elements in his paintings, for me, were points to roam into the painting and see other things and give clues to maybe parts of the painting, but they weren't the painting. # v is very, very extraordinary # e is even more than anyone that you adore

# can love... # when i went to los angeles, it was really... ..three times better than i thought it would be. # ..just a game for two... # i thought, "well, this is it. hollywood is near here." and i'd just read an american novel called city of night by john rechy, which has accounts of kind of lowlife in american cities, and i thought it was all wonderful and colourful and everything. but, erm, i wanted to get up to hollywood

and see what it was all like and see the hustlers and the sea and everything. and i bought a bicycle to go there, because i didn't know how to get there, and, of course, it's about 16 miles from santa monica. horn blares "later, i would think of america as one vast city of night "stretching gaudily from times square to hollywood boulevard, "jukebox winking, rock and roll moaning,

"america at night fusing its dark cities "into the unmistakable shape of loneliness. "remember pershing square and the apathetic palm trees, "one-night sex and cigarette smoke "and rooms squashed in by loneliness. "and i would remember lives lived out darkly "in that vast city of night, "from all-night movies to beverly hills mansions." thunder rumbles

i got there and realised there was nobody in pershing square. it had all altered, this empty thing, big palm trees. i did find a bar later, but it was then i realised, "well, i need a car." you just need a car. a bicycle won't do, i mean... so i gave the bicycle away and bought a car. i used to work on a morning, and then, in the afternoon, it got very hot and sunny, so i'd go and lie on the beach.

and then, i'd work again in the evening. and i'd maybe work until about 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock. then i'd go for a drink, you see. in california, the bars don't close until two, which seems to me, in a way, the ideal hour. if you're going to close them at all, it's the ideal hour, because, in a way, it's not too late and you can make up your mind about things, i suppose, you see, at two o'clock.

four o'clock is a bit late, really. you can go in a bar and meet the equivalent of a plumber, from brooklyn, could be sat at the next stool, and some other guy... ..you know, a movie maker from hollywood could be sat at the... ..on the next stool. i mean, that can happen. in london, you can't do this. los angeles to david meant surfers. and there were a lot of boys around.

and, uh... and all that was, i think, very... ..erotic and beautiful to david, and he depicted it. it was 1964 and chris isherwood phoned and said that a young english artist had phoned him who was here in santa monica and could he come by and visit chris on an afternoon? chris said, "of course." david hockney arrived, very dyed blond,

and my memory was in a gold jacket! chris was a distinguished writer and i suppose the most famous british queer living in, er, la, and, erm, yes, er, david would have known about him and would have read his books, too. we'd already been together 15 years, and at that time, that was considered phenomenal. two men living together and 30 years difference between them, and, er, they haven't, er, shot one another or,

er, at least, er, split up. er, er, er, yeah. he took a lot of photographs and even did some preliminary drawings. chris, he got that figure in the painting right away, and you can tell from looking at the painting, it's very freshly painted. it was a really fresh version and it was good, i kept it, and, of course, he had the, er, photographs to remind him. the painting of me

is much heavier technique, if you look closely. he had a lot of trouble with me. i think it may have given david the idea of finding a partner for himself, since it seemed to work well for chris and me. david met a student at ucla during the summer, peter schlesinger, and he liked peter very much. i believe peter was what david was somehow looking for. but, er, he called once and he was taking, erm,

this young student of his from tarzana in the valley... there's a place called tarzana where... ..where...burroughs... burroughs lived in tarzana and created tarzan. edgar rice burroughs created it in the valley and so, it's called tarzana. and, er, and er, david did a now famous painting of peter which is called the room tarzana. don bachardy: he was a very attractive young man,

and quite beautiful and, er, yes, i think david was enchanted by him. neither had ever lived in a romantic relationship with a partner and that made it a lot of fun to be around them. my first encounter was with a picture, not with david as a person. i was captured by doll boy, as a picture that seemed to me original and "gay" in the old sense of the word

and, er...rule-breaking... and witty. i particularly liked that painting and, at that time, had sufficient money to buy it outright and then wanted to meet david. david acquired fans with enormous facility. cecil beaton had already bought a picture on one of his visits to the royal college.

it was a time when snowdon was making photographs for a book called private view, and people saw the potential in david as someone that you could write a lot about. i had great ambition at the time. i wanted to show what i thought of as the greatest art. i'd formulated a pretty strong idea of what i liked most and it was almost entirely american abstract colour field painting. but, of course, in england, i wanted to represent what i thought was the best in english painting,

whether it, it fitted in with all of the american taste or not. and hockney was the only figurative artist that i found interesting, exciting, that i wanted to be the defender of. you could say david was the only figurative artist in a deadly serious abstract place, but, in fact, the influence of the ones on the other were quite strong. i mean, a number of his pictures were painted thinking about colour field painting, you know. he'd already

pretty rapidly became a blond, a flamboyant dresser... ..a maker of public statements, i mean, the sort of person that draws the attention of journalists. and it was at the very moment when... when the eye of the press and the taste-makers was on the british art world and fashion world. and david stood out as one of the banner carriers for the new approach to art, life and, in fact,

the emerging openness of gay life. david always had a sense of humour. for instance, when tony snowdon said, "come round and have "a look at kensington palace," when he was married to princess margaret. tony used to take great delight in those days showing you the bathroom with the m and the coronet on top of a lavatory seat, and saying, "you can have a pee in," you know, "margaret's lav, if you like." and then, he asked david to sign the visitor's book and david said,

"no, no," he said, "i'm not going to sign that. "i don't want my name in there, come the revolution!" in 1962, i'd been at a demonstration in trafalgar square. when it was over, i thought i'd come in the national gallery and have look at frescos by domenichino from a room in the villa aldobrandini near rome. then i became fascinated with, er, things about the pictures. the space of the picture, you see, is really only one foot. as you can see here, there's, er...

the picture begins here and there's some floor. and the dwarf that you see is stood in front of this tapestry, which is the back of the picture. the picture is only the depth of a, of a person, as a matter of fact, which is about one foot. so i did my version of this painting. you can see the tapestry quite clearly and you can see i've painted a fleur-de-lys border. and instead of a dwarf, i got

a friend, in fact, he's an art dealer called kasmin, to pose for me and i defined the front of the picture by putting a sheet of glass over this section. and i got kas to pose for this and i did some drawings and i took some photographs of him pressed against the glass. and so my figure is trapped between the tapestry and the glass. in fact, the idea of that painting i've kept repeating and repeating, and the idea of a border still interests me.

for example, here's another painting that i did in hollywood. because it's got a border round it, you cannot, as it were, walk straight into the picture. if it's got a border, it's like this rope being here, and to climb into it, you've got to climb over this, you see, and then you'd have to go onto the diving board... board rattles

and fall into the swimming pool and there's the splash. water splashes 'henry geldzahler was a curator at the metropolitan museum of art.' - intercom buzzes- 'hello?' hi, dave. it's henry. it was obvious that david was the most important person in his life. they spoke on the telephone almost every day for 20 or 30 minutes. of course, in those days, there were no mobile phones. there was a table where the telephone sat

and you had conversations. so, i got to know david through one-sided phone conversations that henry was having with him and i realised they shared absolutely every aspect of their life. the art, the books, the friendships, the lovers, the gossip, everything. it was total friendship. david was essentially a figure of the 19th century in many respects. the literature, the art, the music that he was deeply involved in, much of it was 19th century,

and the same was true of henry. that's what david loved about henry. in the 1960s and the 1970s, david was a very unfashionable artist. he was involved with poetry, literature. he wanted to bring all of these things into his art. so, david was engaging all of these subjects that most artists were working very hard to eliminate from their work. he was,

in many ways, a figure who was excluded from the contemporary dialogue that was taking place, and to have henry's, erm, imprimatur, interest, friendship, i think it meant a great deal to him. and he was not shy about telling david what he liked and what he didn't like about both his art and his personality, but he always did it in a very loving, gentle way. one of the things that david relied on henry every six months or so, would be to go through a stack of drawings,

and every now and then, there'd be something, and henry would pick it up and tear it up, throw it in the trash. music: una furtiva lagrima from l'elisir d'amore by donizetti if, next week, this country did collapse but on the very day it collapsed you met your absolute true love, you wouldn't give two hoots about the bloody place collapsing, would you? i mean, you know, you'd think, "oh, all's right with the world.

"if we have a sandwich and a, and a glass of beer, it doesn't matter." # una furtiva lagrima # negli occhi suoi spunto... # lots of david's portraits are about togetherness, aren't they, really? togetherness is two people, and it's always a kind of interesting equation for him, cos, in a way, we're all alone, but it's nice to be part of something and part of somebody else. david and ossie were really good pals.

ossie was a very flamboyant character in his own way and single-minded. in fact, his shows were quite unique, and he'd bill the music to the fashion models, to the whole catwalk experience. we were all pals together and i suppose leading a certain bohemian life. and it was very innocent then. you were enjoying being young,

and in london, and doing things you really liked doing. david asked ossie and myself if we'd pose for him. i remember going to powis terrace and him taking lots of photographs. and i know, for instance, he couldn't get ossie's feet correctly painted, so he put the shag pile carpet on the floor and hid his feet in the carpet. and he made the bedroom into the sitting room

cos he wanted to choose various things that he thought were to do with our personalities. i met peter when he first came over with david. there was this new person to engage with and it was peter. i think he made a nice home for david. i think he wanted to have a, a stylish home. # un solo instante i palpiti # del suo bel cor sentir... # david had acquired the leases on the surrounding flats

and said would i knock the walls down between them and make a very lovely lateral apartment? as far as i'm concerned, i just designed the flat that i'd want for myself. little did i know, i'd later have it. david's quite sociable, so he likes to give parties, to have people around, so to have a big room at one end of the apartment and at the other and then a beautiful long gallery between them,

that was very appealing. # ..confondere i miei coi suoi sospir # cielo! si puo morir! # peter dealt with curtains and tiles and finishes and furniture. peter would go out and hunt for things and then he'd take david to see them and decide together. he would go out to the market and buy vases and, you know... bits and pieces, but if it was like a big thing,

david would get very involved. he was the first person i lived with, yeah. yeah, it was very nice, very, very nice. you know, when people said to me, "ah, well, when you said you were gay "in 1960 or something and, well, it was illegal," and this, that and the other... and this, that and the other, and i said, "well, i lived in bohemia "and bohemia is a tolerant place." when he's in london, he quite often pops round.

he used to just ring the doorbell and come in and prowl around. particularly, he liked going into his old studio and just standing there, remembering all the great paintings he did there. clavichord plays the clavichord was near a doorway which was near the window. - and so, it was, it was...- and i was leaning against it. yes, and it was, it...

with all our underwear all over the floor. it was... wayne's jockstraps were everywhere. well, they, i needed them. oh. i was playing a flat, this note. and i wanted to call the painting a flat. a small flat. cos it was. a very small flat, yes. but it was really a painting about stillness.

i think it would have been wonderful. it's unfinished. the development of what should have been a really beautiful, serene, happy, listening, still painting became a huge dilemma of mixtures of colours and unfinished sequences and painting out the floor and repainting in the background. and every time we went round there, there was something different going on and i just thought, "this will never get done." he was worried about something called the vanishing point. i think the problem wasn't really the vanishing point.

it was the "vanishing peter". david was splitting up with peter, and that was a very upsetting period, for both of them, actually. david was very upset. he was, i think, genuinely in love with peter. they had their troubles. but, you know, starting a relationship is, er, very tricky, er, even a man and a woman, and, er, the first time either of them had ever been involved in such a relationship.

of course, they were going to have problems. that was a very upsetting period. i think he was taking tranquilisers as well. he was just crying a lot. i mean, it had been a long period that he'd been with peter, and it was just suddenly a devastating point, which actually did come through the picture, because it was an unfinished scene, like his life was unfinished without him. # del suo bel cor sentir! #

i think there were periods of depression. i have films of him lying on the water bed, obviously very depressed, being comforted by henry. whether that was related to the break-up with peter or whether that was just something that is endemic to his personality, i'm not, i've never been absolutely sure. he can be extremely up and then we've all seen moods where he's not happy. but he got a lot of support.

in the summer of '75 and '76, both he and henry stayed all summer at my house at the shore. it was right on the beach. he liked being there and he liked painting. he uses his work to escape the world. and i remember he'd sit there in the living room and paint and eat out of this huge barrel of, um, something - it wasn't potato chips or something, and pretty soon the floor would be covered with them like they were sawdust or something.

it was an absolutely... it was a unique time. that's where he started the blue guitar series. i think that was in '76. i'm not sure whether that idea came from henry or... cos henry read a lot - read a lot of poetry, but david always read a lot, too, so i don't know who got the idea, but he spent all summer doing that series. classical guitar music

i mean, i'd begun the etchings and then i thought, the title, i just thought i would call it, er, the blue guitar by david hockney, inspired by wallace stevens who was inspired by pablo picasso. and the names could get bigger as they go down. the source of the poem was a painting of picasso, and so i'm turning the poem back into a painting and etchings. they said, "you have a blue guitar. you do not play things as they are." the man replied, "things as they are are changed upon the blue guitar."

and they said then, "but play you must, a tune beyond us, yet ourselves, "a tune upon the blue guitar of things exactly as they are." when i read it, you see, i loved the phrase, "you do not play things as they are", because the philistine response to picasso was, "you do not paint things as they are". well, there's no such thing as "things as they are". in painting, where you deceive the eye with all sorts of devices to make things look as they are...

i don't know, this, the poem just triggered ideas in my head. so, i started making drawings which are just inventions, which was, er, a change for me from the past two years. i... in the painting, for instance, there's things... er, the coloured line right at the top is simply a coloured line, so that's absolutely as it is. there's no illusion there. but the water falling is illusionistic. and you make references to other kinds of painting. i mean, playing games like that seemed such fun to me.

i just went on and on. the work has always been this core of david's life. the first break-up was very difficult for him. but the art is the thing that gives him the anchor, in life and in the world. i mean, i think anything that happens, as long as he's able to, er, see the world through his painting and stuff, he could... he could survive anything. i've, you know... i've taken photographs for a long, long time

and i have about 100 albums full of photographs. all of life, it's all recorded pictorially. most people who ever come into it, i photograph in some way. and later, maybe i draw them but usually i don't draw them instantly, i just take a snap. it is like a diary. i'm just a snapper, really. we see so many photographic images and film images and they're so mainstream,

we're so used to thinking of those as the way of representing the world, but he knows that one can do things with painting that one cannot do with, with erm, photographic technologies. one can express visions of the world, ways of seeing, that invite you to look at things that you would only just glance at if it was a photograph or even if you were seeing it in reality. he's introducing something much more personal, something more moving.

and he's trying with many tactics to show that painting can do this. i'd become very, very aware of this frozen moment that was very unreal to me. the photographs didn't really have life in the way a drawing or painting did. and i realised it couldn't because of what it is. compared to rembrandt looking at himself for hours and hours and scrutinising his face, and putting all these

hours into the picture that you're going to look at, naturally, there's many more hours there than even you can give it. a photograph is the other way round. it's a fraction of a second, frozen. so, the moment you've looked at it for even four seconds, you're looking at it for far more than the camera did. and, er, i... er, it dawned on me that this was visible, actually. it is visible, and, er, the more you become aware of it,

the more this is a terrible weakness. drawings and paintings do not have this. i made a little photographic experiment with the polaroid, by putting 30 of them together, made a, a photograph of this house in a way that i'd been trying to paint the house from three different viewpoints. and the photograph excited me so much and... well, time was appearing in the picture and, because of it, space - a bigger illusion of space.

now, the space is an illusion - i was aware of that, but the time is not an illusion. it is real and accounted for in the number of pictures. you know it took time to take them, wait for them, put them down and so on. and this began... i realised was, er, giving you this illusion of space that we had not seen - i had not seen - in a photograph before. i'm interested in pictures, made any way, and the visible world

and representing it. that's why picasso is always interesting. he never left the visible world - never left depiction, actually. rain falls gently his greatest hero for most of his life has been pablo picasso, whose art moves through phases and different approaches and styles with great frequency throughout a long life. so david's aware of the fact that almost everything he does is going to sell the second

he's put his name to it and he does not want to become a machine for producing items of value. he frequently ran into periods when... he was dissatisfied with, erm, what he was doing and thrashing about looking for new and different ways of doing it. he did not like just going on using... his...immense facility for drawing didn't satisfy his ambition. surfaces that you can decide where to look, i find fascinating. you know, in a way, with water,

you can look at a reflection, then you're looking at the surface, or you can suddenly take the reflection away and look through it... and somehow the problem of depicting it becomes a wonderful way of, in your head, thinking of graphic terms and devices to depict it all. early ones are done with very, very stylised form in the water -

jigsaw shapes with a heavy blue line describing the interlocking shapes as though somebody's jumped in the pool and all the shapes are dancing. the painting called the sunbather - the dancing line is yellow, which happens if it's very sunny and you get this dancing yellow line all the time. later on i could make the water look very fluid and wet by putting acrylic paint that was very, very diluted, and you put a detergent in it, so when you paint on the canvas,

the canvas soaks it up like blotting paper. even the painting of the splash, for instance - somehow what i quite liked about doing it was the perversity of painting something that lasts for one second. but it took me seven days' work to paint the splash itself. if you look carefully, it's painted in single lines with a small brush. i like the idea, you see, of a realistic painting, of a real figure, looking at another figure but the other figure is distorted naturally by the water.

cow moos sheep bleats i was the technical director when the met opened the french triple bill. what we did was to take david's pieces, in the case of parade, the ideas of someone who's basically not working all the time in the theatre, and translate them to the stage, but add the things that you know that...that make it...make it work.

oh, i think the challenges were, for him, just the scale of things. this is a model of the metropolitan opera stage. and the story of the opera is about a naughty child. and the little boy says, "i'm fed up of being good. i want to be wicked." so, he picks up a poker from the fireplace, he runs around the room, he smashes the teapot. music: l'enfant et les sortileges very shortly after the met reopened, there was parade,

in the wintertime when everyone is desperate for light and colour and here is something totally fresh, totally new, something unlike anyone had ever seen at the met. um, and i think it just... it lifted people's spirits and it... it kind of took them to a different place. and david was a major instrument in having that happen. henry and david in europe, they would arrive in a european city and immediately go to the opera house,

look to see what was playing, get tickets. and then they'd go to the museum. then they'd have lunch and they'd go back to the hotel. henry would write. david would have his sketch pad and his coloured pencils. then they'd have a nap. then they'd come out, have dinner, go to the opera house. music: tristan und isolde by wagner there's a lot of music.

there's often four minutes of music with nobody singing, which means you've to be looking at something. in fact, you've to be looking at something in an interesting way to hear that music, to really hear it. so, we'll figure a way, you know, to slowly reveal the forest and so on, i mean, just do it very slowly. 'tristan and isolde,' i worked for a year in here on it. one year, actually, it took,

'matching the music and getting the colours and things. 'it was a long, big job. i used' to sit up here with it and i'd... we had a big model with lights, and i had all these little lights where i could, er, change it and do things. sometimes, i'd smoke a joint and then put on the music and fiddle with the lights. it was terrific, actually, that, doing it. and, i must confess the other night i saw tosca, i was looking

at tosca, and it suddenly occurred to me that the only puccini opera that doesn't have a lot of cruelty in it is, um, boheme. at least she dies, er, from tb. this opera, not only does nobody die, it ends on the best note of hope i've ever come across on a musical stage, i think, that there is real hope for us wretched people. this is actually the drawing we're finally using to make the set for the poulenc opera, which is a scene in the south of france.

it's supposed to be jolly and pretty. erm... 'unlike some designers and unlike some artists, 'david was completely swept up with the music. 'to him, the music suggested visual things 'and i think that was a big appeal.' and one of the things that often is missing in theatrical productions is that kind of reverence for, for the...for the work of art, but also a kind of willingness to be completely one

with its slightly sentimental side, and david loved that. music: parade by eric satie 'it's gone now for me, music.' i don't go to the opera any more because i can't really hear it. i mean, i'd have to sit right at the front or something. i mean, i...i don't go because if you go, i leave the theatre a bit depressed.

well, he's just coming off of his theatre work, ok, and he's fed up with that. he doesn't know what he wants to do next and he is kind of loose at this moment. and he's visiting friends and he's having a good time in new york, and he comes over for dinner, ok, to see what i'm up about. and so, i show him the, er, great ellsworth kelly paper images. and he's absolutely thunderstruck. he's moved, really moved. and he also said, you know, 'these, ken, are fantastic.

"how are they made?" so i said, "well, you know, stay for, you know, after dinner. "stay till tomorrow and i'll show you. we'll make up a couple of pieces of paper "and i'll show you how it's done." that, that's the turn-on, you know. "oh, you'll show me? ok." so we started to play. music: blue pools by john harle at first he confessed about, "oh, i don't want to do this.

"i have to make every one of these myself," you know. "they're not reproducible," you know. "i don't know whether i want to do all these." but he did all these, and every time he did a new one, he wanted to make another one. and we wound up working 18 hours a day. i mean, it was slave labour for 49 days. all of us just loved it. we couldn't get enough of it. because each and every piece he made was just one more note

of greatness that he was putting down for us to hear, to see. and he knew that he was onto something as much as we did. i think paper pools helped him tremendously in his painting. yeah, i really do. um, because i think it freed him up. i think it also gave him a different kind of idea about colour, how to use colour more boldly. come on, stanley. come on. 'david loved having the dachshunds down there and walking on the beach.'

dog barks 'but i think, ultimately, david's house in malibu, it wasn't very david. 'i mean, it was very david in its kind of hominess, 'but i don't think it ever became 'his home, i mean, david's never been a weekend person, so 'i thought it was a bit strange. 'and it was decorated very nicely and cosy. 'it was very funky and old-fashioned, unlike slick malibu at the time.' but, er, as anybody that's lived in la knows,

it's actually a long way to go to go have lunch or to have a dinner and get in the car and drive. it was a transitional time. a lot of david's older friends were not there all the time. it was a world in the 1970s where to be gay was to be beautiful and fashionable. it... the whole world was right there in the palm of your hands. when david came to new york, a lot of times, he was here to party. he would go to the baths.

he would go out to the bars. he was having a good time. and then, all of a sudden, aids came along and suddenly things went exactly in the opposite direction, and it... it was like a plague. one person after the next would come down with aids and it was quite simply a death sentence. i think it was something that shook david to his core.

you think about them every day and then you stop it, because there's too many, actually, er, and it would rather drive you mad if you think about it. er, and slowly, you have to realise it's kind of part of... it's become part of your life, this, er... something you never, ever expected. at the time, i couldn't write down all the people.

i mean... it did change new york. i think it's that that changed it more than anything else, because i... when i think of all those people, if they were still there in new york, new york would be different today, it would. there would be bohemia still. and that's the world i arrived in and that's the world i lived in, actually.

two thirds of the people that he was really close to suddenly just weren't there any more. they just disappeared. and henry, when henry died, it really was the final blow. of course, henry didn't die of anything to do with hiv or aids, but i think that was a terrible blow for david. when henry died, it affected david, i think, particularly badly because i think he realised he was never going to find another person who knew him as well as henry did.

truman capote once said, "love is never having to finish a sentence." and what that means is you're so much on the same page with the other person, you can begin a sentence and they immediately know what you're going to say. it's that kind of communication that henry had with david and vice versa. and when henry died, that was something that david never really discovered in anybody else again. chamber music plays fire crackles

so, i goes round to david's, you see, one morning, and he's got this colour tv set and he says, er, and says, "ah, would you like to see it? you ever seen colour tv?" and he switches it on, you see, and he gets the colour and he turns the colour up right full on, as far as the knobs'll go, you know, and he goes, "aye." and he looks like this and he says, "aye," he says, "you can have it fauvist if you want," you know. # happy birthday, dear david

# happy birthday to you. # cheering - woman:- oh, he's icing his cake. oh, you see that? 'there's a wonderful self-portrait 'he did on his birthday, where he literally 'took off his brooks brothers red-and-white striped shirt' and laid it on the copying machine and printed it in red. it's a wonderful... and then he drew his face and did the self-portrait.

he has such bravura because he has such amazing ability as a draughtsman. fax machine beeps when the plain paper fax came, where you could have individual pieces of paper, david bought back that pattern he uses all the time of doing pictures in grids, so that the small piece of paper can suddenly become this enormous picture.

woman: oh, it's tennis. there's two players, a net in the middle. applause he even sent a big show, a whole show, to brazil, to the biennale, er, that he never went to. he just gave the instructions of how to put it up and it was put up. i think he thought it was amusing that hand was coming back to this technology that most people in business were using to communicate contracts and legal deals.

i think he's always looking for new tools. he takes something that seems very common and everyday. and in 2009, david had already done, i think, about 200 of the iphone drawings. most of them were flowers. we all got them in new york, when we woke up in the morning, so you'd have this wonderful flower in the sunlight of his bedroom window. then the ipad came out

and then the drawings got so even more amazing, but also you could do the playback of the animation of the actual drawing, which was a huge new thing. even david had never been able to watch his own work as it was unfolding. i think it was a real lens into david's creative process. stanley. good boy. good boy. he's a good boy.

- thank you.- you're welcome. i think that david wants us to think differently. he wants us to see differently and think differently. he makes you stand in the painting. he makes you look up and left and right and down. and you, the experience becomes a different one from the traditional easel painting. david thought that the idea of a viewer and the vanishing point was very anti-humanistic.

and the idea of you being the vanishing point and the world around you opening up to you was almost a religious concept in david's mind, i think. i think there is possibly a great connection between the way we depict space and the way we behave in it. i've always thought perspective was a problem, so anything that is now helping to change it, like this photograph i did on an iphone, i find quite exciting, actually. this is... this seems to me to be widening perspectives.

it's a different perspective, wider. things are opening out, it seems to me. it's better to go that way than that way, i think. that way is... better than doing that, i think. he realised that there was a non-photographic way of seeing the world, which david really embraced. particularly because we don't see the world through one eye, we see the world through two eyes spatially, and i think that the spaces of california, the grand canyon,

all of those things excited him, and he always thought that painting could express those things in ways that photography couldn't. he always said one photograph is not good enough and that photo collages were an attempt to try to have a wider perspective. he kept saying, "wider perspectives are needed now." 'there are some good landscape photographs.' there are, but not that many. partly because, i mean,

cameras see surfaces, they don't see space. but we see space. i think the thrill in landscape is a spatial thrill, actually. i think so. nature is the endless infinity, isn't it? you always go back to nature for things. that's what i was doing in yorkshire, yeah. he ate it, yeah.

so, now we've got an i that's been made into an x. you ate it, didn't you, barney? see that letter there, look? that x? barney ate the x. so i had to make a new one. - so you had to make one from an i.- yeah. and what about that missing i? that's totally confused me now. i realise what's thrown me out. you never had too many is.

it's lack of the i.