MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
David Hockney, one of the world's most important contemporary painters, has died at the age of 88. The British artist used electric colors to capture the world around him, something he talked about with our colleague, the late NPR correspondent Susan Stamberg back in 2016.
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SUSAN STAMBERG: To Hockney, looking and showing are as old as time. Some caveman picked up a rock and drew an animal on the wall.
DAVID HOCKNEY: And then when he'd got the animal down, the person would have grunted or something and said, I've seen something like that.
STAMBERG: Is making pictures, do you think, part of the DNA of being human?
HOCKNEY: Yes, yes. Very young people pick up a crayon and start to draw - don't they? - very, very young people. I think the idea of making pictures is deep within us.
STAMBERG: Hockney's "History Of Pictures" book is chock full of images, a few photos, but mostly reproductions of paintings he's loved looking at over the years. He's crazy for Rembrandt, of course, and Picasso, his hero, and the late 16th-century Italian painter Caravaggio.
HOCKNEY: Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting.
STAMBERG: (Laughter) Oh, my goodness. There's a woman. She's cutting a guy's head off, "Judith Beheading Holofernes," 1599. And look at - why do you call it Hollywood lighting?
HOCKNEY: Well, it is Hollywood lighting. I mean, this is lighting that's not natural.
STAMBERG: No sun could shine so brightly on Judith's breast and then disappear to make such dark, velvety shadows right behind her. It's dramatic, unreal. Only movies can illuminate like that. Light and where it comes from is every painter's preoccupation. For David Hockney, light on water has particular fascination.
What is it with you and water, David Hockney?
HOCKNEY: Well, water offers an interesting graphic problem, it seems to me. Say, a swimming pool - the water is transparent. How do you paint transparency? It has reflections and things.
STAMBERG: "A Bigger Splash," his best-known painting from 1967, shows a Californian swimming pool, tan diving board angling in from the bottom right, and rising from the aquamarine water, a lively, white splash. Someone just dove in.
HOCKNEY: I spent longer on the splash than on any other thing in the painting. I spent about a week painting it because it's painted with small brushes. I mean, I didn't want to just take a brush and splash it like that. I wanted to paint it slowly. And I thought then it contradicts the splash really.
STAMBERG: Yes. Oh.
HOCKNEY: Yeah.
STAMBERG: 'Cause it took you so long to what, in life, took a second.
HOCKNEY: Yes, yes.
STAMBERG: When you go in a museum or a gallery, what's the first thing you look at in a painting?
HOCKNEY: You look at the surface, the paint itself, and then you might then see a figure. But I think, first of all, you see the surface.
STAMBERG: That is really a painter's answer. You or I would look first at the pear, the face, the horse. We're not Hockney. David Hockney believes painting can change the world. In the midst of all our miseries, he says, art lets us see the world as beautiful, thrilling, mysterious.
HOCKNEY: Well, I do see it that way. Yes, I do because I enjoy looking. I do. I mean, I do get a deep pleasure from looking. I can look at a little puddle on a road in Yorkshire and just of the rain falling on it and think it's marvelous. I see the world as very beautiful. Yes, I do.
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KELLY: That was the painter David Hockney, who died Thursday, speaking with the late Susan Stamberg.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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