HOCKNEY

David Hockney has just been speaking about how much he adores Turkish tobacco. For Hockney, one of Britain’s leading and best-loved painters of the past five decades, a packet of Camels is a pleasure under threat. Lighting up, he leans towards me, the hint of a conspiratorial smile playing around his lips. “Do you know how it works?” he asks slowly. I am confused by the question, but because I’ve been fiddling with a brand new tape recorder, wondering whether to put it on Dictaphone or Lecture mode (it soon becomes clear that Lecture is more fitting), I think for one startled moment that he might be about to accuse me of unprofessionalism – a journalist who doesn’t know how to use a tape machine.

“No, no,” he says, “the smoking ban. Why do you think people are angry with their MPs right now?” His Yorkshire accent lends his voice an added note of curmudgeonliness. Nothing to do with the expenses scandal, perhaps? Or the recently highlighted systemic failures of the judicial system?

“I want you to hear this,” he says, settling into his argument. “There are 11 million smokers in this country. They’ve all got a friend, so that’s 22 million people you’re dealing with. Now, if you tell 22 million people that they can’t be social any more, don’t you think there’ll be consequences?”

Complaining about the smoking ban is one of Hockney’s passions. In fact, you have to steer very hard indeed to get him off the topic, and attempts to widen the discussion often come to nothing. As he is clearly a man who hates any sort of government interference, would he say that he’s a libertarian at heart? But it’s as if he hasn’t heard the question, because he carries on regardless. (Perhaps he really hasn’t, given that he has been hard of hearing for years. However, Hockney’s latest hearing aid is not only more discreet, but also much more effective than the ones he has been used to, so I think he is probably being selective.)

“I’m perfectly aware what will happen,” he continues, “because I know California and I notice that 40 per cent of adverts on television are for prescription drugs. That’s replaced tobacco. If you think that’s really good, I don’t. You think it’s really good.” I haven’t said anything of the sort, but Hockney is obviously in a combative mood. Later he tells me I’m a bit of a shit for wanting people to be bossed about. He says it playfully (I think) because he is actually a very personable host and interviewee otherwise. Still, it’s not exactly comfortable being called a shit by Hockney.

He also lets me know how much he loathes Gordon Brown, but when asked if he will be voting for David Cameron in the next general election, he suddenly sounds resigned, tired of the whole shoddy, to-hell-in-a-handcart business. “I don’t really care about the next election,” he says. “I care about bossiness. I’m fed up with being bossed around. Pubs aren’t health clubs – you go to drown your sorrows.”

Quite so, but right now, at the age of 71 – albeit with perhaps just a few thoughts of mortality beginning to bear down on him – there surely can’t be many sorrows for Hockney to drown. For the past 20 years he has lived, in what is a devoted partnership, with John Fitz-Herbert; they have two lively Jack Russells that the painter adores (anyone familiar with Hockney’s work will know that dogs have not only served him as much-loved pets but as muses, too); he regularly entertains a full house at his home in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, with good friends who come to visit from London, New York and LA.

Most importantly, however, he is working with as much vigour, passion and focus as ever. The weekend I visit him, in what was his late mother’s home – he bought it for her when she was 90, and she died ten years ago at the age of 99 – he has been waiting for the hawthorns to blossom; they just have and he is terribly excited about that. Every morning for weeks he has been up at dawn, accompanied by his assistant, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima – “the only person to have left Paris for Bridlington” – painting outdoors on large canvases.

Furthermore, he has two major exhibitions on the go. The largest, at the Kunsthalle Würth near Stuttgart, features 70 works and is the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s East Yorkshire landscapes to date. The other, in London, is at the Annely Juda gallery. The fruits of this intense labour are evident in his aircraft-hangar-sized studio, about five minutes’ drive from his house on the coast. The walls are lined with portraits and landscapes, the same ones you will find on the walls at Annely Juda: executed using a stylus, a graphic tablet and Photoshop, but looking remarkably like conventional paintings. Hockney can print out an unlimited number of them. (He is keen on new technology – he uses his iPhone as a sketchbook and sends pictures to friends every morning.)

Though Hockney settled in Bridlington about four years ago, he insists California is still his base, because that is where his vast archive remains. It might come as a surprise to some that he has found such an absorbing motif in the local, gentle landscape. Flatter and markedly less dramatic than West Yorkshire, where Hockney grew up – he’s a Bradford lad – it is certainly less feature-filled than California, where he originally had such an impact in 1967 with his celebrated LA pop painting A Bigger Splash.

However, Hockney’s vibrant palette imbues the locality with a visionary quality: autumn leaves burn with the intensity of a flame; the roads themselves blush in soft hues of pink and lilac; and the silhouetted, skeletal branches of winter trees have an almost human presence, since, “like people, trees are all individuals”. He points to a frieze-like photograph of a line of naked trees hanging on the far side of the studio wall and says: “In the winter, you’ll notice their differences more than in the summer, because the branches are all pointing up, looking for light. And a tree like that, especially in winter, is the best physical manifestation we see of the life force.”

Would his cool, bleach-blond, mop- topped, 30-year-old self have been surprised to have turned into such a keen observer of nature and its changing seasons? He shrugs. “Probably not,” he says. “Most of my art deals with the visible world. And I’ve always been fascinated by images. Images more than art, actually.”

Returning from his studio, I am invited to join him and a few house guests – most of them recognisable by their portraits – for dinner (roast beef with crispy Yorkshire pudding, beautifully cooked by John). Hockney relates an anecdote that underscores his disdain for the anti-smoking brigade he had been getting so worked up about earlier. He’s sitting on a bench in Holland Park in London, puffing on a cigarette, when he sees two girls jogging past. Because he is smoking, and probably because they recognise who he is, they playfully make a disapproving gesture.

“But,” he says, “those two girls, were they really using their eyes? Did they notice the larks as they jogged past? They were busy jogging, but there’s no sense of wonder at what’s around them. I notice things.”