Three weeks ago I got this text from David Hockney: “have been in bed two days very exhausted, and sleeping most of the time, it’s a pattern in my life. I push myself too much and then just crash.” I’ve just finished a TV documentary for BBC ONE's Imagine on his homecoming, back to the East Yorkshire Wolds he loves. It took four years to make. I know this crazed pattern, it’s ruled much of my recent existence.

For the last month he’s been pushing out a stream of stunning images from his iPhone, starting at 4AM dawn or earlier, often three or four by breakfast-time. Visiting him three weeks ago, he was in a frenzy, recording the rampant but short-lived hawthorn blossom. Welcome to Hockneyland.

My film went out Tuesday night on BBC ONE and today I am feeling as muggy as the weather. I’ve just read the (mostly positive) reviews, and lots of people have texted and emailed their congratulations. Hockney left a message saying he thought it was very, very good, the pacing excellent and it swept you along to the end. That’s good news. He also advises me to ignore any critics, unless they touch a real nerve; in his experience that’s very rare. Trust your film – over time truth will out.

I liked too a remark from somebody I don’t know, forwarded on to me by my oldest friend, “Bruno Wollheim's film was fantastic and would not have missed it for the world. It is such an intimate portrait of Hockney, a huge achievement to have been able to bring this off. Hockney himself, complete with trademark cap & cigarette, a paradoxical combination of the defiantly traditional & the exuberantly modern, comes across as a very Great Talent, even a genius, dare I say, on a footing with Picasso or Turner (say) in his range and diversity. Presumably Bruno must have a lot more material than was shown here. What will he do with it?”

Reading and listening to the reviews and previews (and ignoring those that retread the press hand-outs), a lot of people got the humour and the teasing tone of the film – and some just didn’t. For anybody who’s not seen it Hockney had insisted I do all the filming myself so there’s an unusual intimacy of exchange, a dialogue between us where I’m trying to pin down this maddeningly elusive and enigmatic man. That I fail, at least in part, is itself revealing – about him but also about art in general, especially when it is being made fresh in front of your eyes.

My Brixton neighbour rings the bell. She had stayed up to watch, and wanted to say the film felt too short (!) and she could see the difficulty I must have had with this Yokshireman. She’d been in the army, stationed in Yorkshire, “it’s as hard to get the truth out of them as to get them to dig money from their trouser pocket!”


I am confident and proud of the film. It is a true portrait of the Hockney I grew to know, not a hagiography. The two of us on a mystery train with paint brush and camera, the story of a magus going for broke, raging against the dying of the light. I’ve shaved off some of the rough bits but you can still taste the mud and the flies. It’s not “reality” TV but then when it’s good, Documentary is as fictional and artful as memory.

How does my film connect to these free downloadable images David Hockney has made ? The less interesting connection is that he wants to support my film. The other direct connection requires careful explanation.

One of the strands in my film is Hockney’s uneasy love affair with photography. It catches him still obsessed by the research he’d completed on the controversial book and film Secret Knowledge but intent now on translating its conclusions into his own art. Hockney goes back to the hand, and away from a direct reliance on photography; BUT because he was working out of a tiny attic studio in Bridlington he came to rely on digital photography to see what he’s doing. In turn this led him to renew his fascination with the publishing and reproduction of images and their current revolution .

So the iphone images are the natural outcome of what he was doing in the film in that they come from a desire to bring painting and drawing together, but this time in a medium that allows instant direct access, from his hand to the eye of the beholder. He loves the fact there’s no publisher or middle-man involved – no TV Channel, no printer, no publisher, no gallery. It’s direct from him to you.

This morning when I turned on my computer, another of the images arrived. A still life of flowers traced with his thumb, and it’s ravishing. You can see the dawn light hitting the shutters, the surface of the water in the glass vase and a pink Manet-like smudge of a peony. Magic.

IMAGINE.David Hockney: A Bigger Picture, is now available on BBC iPlayer in the UK. A Coluga Pictures production for BBC.
For more information go to www.colugapictures.com . You can download your free David Hockney picture from http://www.bbc.co.uk/imagine until midnight on 2nd July.