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'Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney'
Watching Mark Lawson interview Peter Blake on BBC 4 a while back reminded me of the deep friendship between the two. Having met at the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s, where Hockney was a student and Blake a visiting artist, they have remained close as both of their careers as artists have developed and wherever their lives have taken them, inspiring each other creatively in the process. It was incredibly touching and funny to hear Blake recount how he requested David Hockney as his luxury item on Desert Island Discs and was refused!
I was very interested in learning more about Hockney and Blake's friendship - not least because visitors to the Ferens' Modern and Contemporary Gallery will know that it houses both Peter Blake's 'The Lettermen' (1963) and Hockney's 'Life Painting For Myself' (1962). So I tracked down Marco Livingstone's excellent Peter Blake book 'Peter Blake: One Man Show', in which he describes how "the slightly younger artists who arrived as students at the Royal College a few years after his departure...looked up to him as a trailblazer". The book points out how both Hockney and Blake visited LA for the first time around the early Sixties and were both incredibly inspired by it. Livingstone also describes how Blake started painting 'Portrait of David Hockney in a Hollywood Spanish Interior' in 1965 and "was to spend nearly four decades tinkering with the picture from time to time before he finally declared it finished. Hockney, who had owned the painting since 1965 when he exchanged it with Blake for a set of his 'Rake's Progress' etchings but had never taken possession of it, made it a gift to the Tate as soon as Blake told him that it was ready to be handed over." In Livingstone's view, "what one might criticise as unresolved is actually one of its great strengths as it conveys a sense of the vulnerability, tenderness and sensuality that Blake saw in his painter friend, five years his junior. With his shock of dyed blond hair and a still almost childlike fleshy face, and accompanied by the type of handsome young man to whom he was attracted, Hockney is here memorialised not so much as the enfant terrible of the popular press but as an eternally youthful man who experiences life in a heightened state through his eyes and all his senses."
The book also describes how 'Souvenir for Hockney' (1974), went on to inspire an entire show called '30 Souvenirs', created "both as homages and as gifts for fellow artists..(and) a way of remembering of of keeping those old friends forever by his side". 'The Meeting' or 'Have a Nice Day, Mr Hockney' (1981-3) could perhaps even be considered a souvenir of the their experiences of LA: as Livingstone notes it "deals most overtly with the circumstances of Blake's visit to Hockney in the company of (Howard) Hodgkin. Hockney assumes the role of the master allotted by Courbet to himself in the nineteenth century picture, while Hodgkin is shown rather mischievously as the humble and obsequious servant. Blake presents himself as Hockney's equal, but one who has come to pay him homage." The book concludes how now "that he has experienced his expected 'ration' of three score and ten years, he has cheerfully enjoyed every subsequent day, and every new opportunity to make more art as a bonus...he is no more likely now than ever to lose the childlike sense of fun, spirit of play and adventure, gentle subversiveness and devil-may-care whimsicality that have guided his art-making for more than 60 years." It strikes me that something very similar could be said of Hockney too, and perhaps that's the key to their enduring friendship and their ability to inspire each other. And why Blake wanted Hockney as his desert island luxury item!
You can only imagine how Hockney and Blake would entertain themselves on their desert island (the luxury item Blake was allowed was a gym! Not really a comparable substitute, but more healthy, you might imagine). But it's lovely to know that at least at the Ferens, Blake and Hockney's early 1960s selves are always marooned together on their own desert island, their whole lives and careers still ahead of them.
*Marco Livingstone has also co-written 'David Hockney: My Yorkshire', which comes out this week.
Post Author CM
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