David Hockney
Yorkshire Brushes
‘Heroes hold paint brushes
Kindness in brushstrokes
Love enfolded in technicolour glory!’
(from Kamal Kaan’s ‘Hockney’s House’, 2020)
Growing up in a Bradford family, it seemed that everyone around me had a Hockney anecdote to impart, almost as if it was a birthright or civic duty. Hockney was the city’s golden boy after all, the flaxen-haired comet from the new age-of-individualism who set off on his global travels but never lost his accent and who remained pleasingly Bradfordian in countless other ways, from his cussed refusal to give up smoking (‘Death awaits you even if you do not smoke’) to his laconic and occasionally cantankerous sense of humour.
Here are some Bradford memories of ‘young David’, all accrued before we loaned him, slightly begrudgingly, to London, LA and the rest of the world.
THE DRAWER
We start with David as a toddler. My mum used to tell me of her schoolfriend Jean, who lived at number 51 Steadman Terrace, sandwiched between Bradford’s Barkerend area to the north and Bowling to the south. The Hockneys lived a few doors up at number 61 and Jean’s mum was very friendly with Laura Hockney.
‘You’ve a lot on with five children, haven’t you, and in our house there was only me and I was already at the Grammar School by then. My mother would slip up there every now and then if Laura said ‘could you take him?’ and she’d look after David. He must have been very small at the time.’ (Jean Wickens, née Burton).
David liked to draw, so drawing was an easy way to keep him occupied. Of course, Jean’s mum didn’t keep the drawings. Later though, whenever a child drew anything in her presence, she’d always keep it, just in case another genius might be passing through. When she died, her family found a whole drawer crammed full – by everyone but David.
‘Laura would send a Christmas card every year after they moved, right up till when she died. I’ve still got a really nice one, dated 1973. It’s a print by David.’
SELF EXPRESSER
As a schoolgirl, my Cousin Helen regularly attended Halle Orchestra evening subscription concerts at St George's Hall in Bradford; mainly, as she recalled, ‘to eye up the boys from Bradford Boys Grammar’. The younger kids would sit on tiered seats behind the orchestra and she’d stare around at the older kids, finding her gaze regularly taken by a strange youth she often saw there with large, round specs and unusual clothing. None other than David Hockney, then at Bradford Art College.
‘This would be around 1956-57, before the days of self-expression, when most of us were still dressing like miniature versions of our parents.’
PRAM PUSHER
Dolly Hanson, my Nan, lived near the Hockneys in the Bowling area of Bradford. Dolly and husband George were on speaking terms with the family, exchanging greetings and a few words whenever they saw one another. Dolly talked of regularly seeing ‘Young David’ in that period, as he set off to find some great vantage point from which to paint views over Bradford, pushing his old pram around as he went, chock full of brushes and paints.
ROOTS
My cousin Liz, a lifelong peroxide blonde, was envious of Hockney’s perfect hair whenever she saw him at Bradford Art College in the 60s (where she dated a couple students, including her first husband-to-be). She claims to be ‘unartistic, but a talented appreciator of artists’.
Hockney had long since left to carry on studying in London - but often came back. ‘There was a lot of to and fro between Bradford and London in that era’ Liz says. ‘I was in his company once, at some kind of social get together. We had a conversation about bleaching one’s hair and he gave me a useful tip about using a polythene bag during the process to accelerate the bleaching.’
THE POTTERY CAT
My favourite family anecdote? This one right here from my Auntie Margaret…
Auntie Margaret was in the same pottery class as David Hockney at Bradford Art College in the mid-50s. Other than being an eccentric character around Bradford, there was no particular indication, as she saw it, of future glory. One day in class, David made a pottery cat, but as he left the class, he took a long appraising look at what he’d created before putting it in the bin. Auntie Margaret, sitting behind, intervened.
‘Oh, you shouldn’t throw it away. You should keep it!’
‘You can have it if you want’ Hockney said and got it out of the bin to give it to her.
After he left, she took another look at the small pottery sculpture, decided he was right and that it wasn’t that great after all. She put it back in the bin.
THE BOWTIE
My very favourite Hockney anecdote, though, isn’t about David at all. It’s something I read years ago (source lost in the mists of time) about Kenneth Hockney, David’s father. It seems he used to cut out small circles of coloured paper to decorate his otherwise plain bowtie, which is so delightfully dandyish. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in Yorkshire.
MARGARET HOCKNEY
Link to my 2008 interview with David’s sister Margaret Hockney for arts website ‘Magnificent Me’:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/64392d9cf111a80057b708ed/t/64ee3f1bbbd8d56b6601609d/1693335323857/Margaret+Hockney+-+Creative+Spotlight.pdf