My day with Hockney by that pool in LA and how
I missed out on a fortune

By CHRISTOPHER WILSON

So farewell then Britain’s greatest living artist – the kindest, nicest superstar I ever met. And with prices for a David Hockney original now heading north of £50 million, I should be thanking him from my swanky Riviera retreat for doing my portrait and making me a rich man.

Instead I’m writing this from my Dartmoor cottage with its draughty windows and leaky gutters while outside in the drive my 10-year old Peugeot sits looking its age.

What went wrong, Wislon? Where’s your Hockney original?

I first encountered the great man soon after I left the Express and was freelancing for The Times. I’d discovered he was tinkering around with an electronic light-box which could create every colour under the rainbow and then a few more, and with typical boyish enthusiasm was experimenting with how he could apply this to the creative process and send the art world off in a whole new direction.

The implications were immense – an entirely new art form supported by our most famous artist – and the Wapping wunderkind I was working for gave me the nod to hop on a plane and interview Hockney at his home in the Hollywood hills.

The pool where he was sitting when I arrived was a mirror image of the one in A Bigger Splash, his most celebrated canvas – big wavy-navy curves lining the interior, the views stretching out over Laurel Canyon. Bradford’s biggest star was living his best life and repaying his good fortune with a restless energy, constantly searching for new techniques and ideas.

Despite his great fame and carefully-curated image, call-me-David could not have been warmer and more friendly. Which was fine while we went through the niceties but a challenge when I discovered my tape recorder had somehow managed to give up the ghost somewhere between Heathrow and LAX.

And so to a confession. I never got beyond 75 wpm and only scraped through my Journalist Proficiency Certificate by tearfully promising my aged shorthand tutor that if she gave me a 100-word pass now, I’d be back every week till I managed to earn it (ha ha).

So there I was, 6,000 miles from home, no backup tape machine and a useless shorthand note, interviewing a superstar for one of the world’s great newspapers. My career was over.

Hockney had been so warm in his welcome I felt able to confess my predicament, but before I had a chance to apologise he was on his feet, calling his assistant to ransack the house for a replacement tape machine. When the search proved fruitless he led me out through his front door, down the long drive scented with bougainvillea and jacaranda, and across the road to his neighbour who after a moment’s search found a recorder and obligingly handed it over.  Back we went.

We sat by the famous pool and as the interview progressed, Hockney started to draw – he couldn’t allow himself to be idle for a moment – and various pencilled sketches fell from his pad as he discarded one and tried again. The world’s worst journo was being captured for posterity by Britain’s greatest artist!

In Hollywood, Hockney’s daily routine rarely altered, and at 4pm his assistant brought in the tea-tray, together with the announcement that film director Tony (Charge of the Light Brigade) Richardson and Irish restaurateur Peter Langan had arrived to join us. Interview over.

As we moved into the shade the assistant swept up the discarded sketches and bore them away. I longed to ask if I could keep one – keep them all! – but my nerve failed. I’d already asked the great man too much.

And so somewhere in the Hockney archive, which will now be mined by art historians and collectors in the wake of David’s death, are a priceless series of studies of an anonymous hack with an anxious look on his face and a bead of sweat on his upper lip.

How I wish I had one of them, but the memory of having once been portrayed by Hockney is somehow a massive consolation prize. He was a genius and a generous, adorable one at that.

14 June 2026