12 books like David Hockney

I adore David Hockney. He draws so beautifully, and in so many different ways, and is always inventive in his art-making. He makes me see more through his art and was a major inspiration for me when I was starting out as an editorial illustrator years ago. This book is a 2020 pandemic conversation between Hockney, now living in Normandy, and his good friend, the art critic Martin Gayford in the UK. It really speaks to the devotion that artists have to observing life and creating something beautiful from it. I love the joy Hockney brings to his work and see that as a powerful energy to create from.

Artist, designer, writer James Victore urges us to be ourselves without hesitation. Artists don’t fit in, we can’t. We’re observers and makers and require a certain distance from the mainstream to refine our vision and do our work. But we can be afraid to express ourselves fully and stand out from the crowd. This book dishes out confidence like candy. It’s a great place to replenish flagging spirits when they descend as they will from time to time. It’s energizing and makes you want to open your eyes and do what you can to further the unfolding of your truth and spirit. Written in short pithy chapters, you can dip in and out of it whenever you need a boost.

Sonia Delaunay’s work with color and abstraction in the first part of the 20th century was groundbreaking as was her ability to also bring her art into the world of the applied arts of fashion, set design, mosaics, tapestries, and lithographs. The book has excellent essays about creative life in Paris at the time and over 250 illustrations. For women, it’s especially inspiring to learn how Delaunay managed to be a wife and mother as well as a respected and prolific artist. It’s also inspiring to see how she made a huge creative leap from representational art to her distinctive abstract art. From the perspective of creativity, I love how she was inventive in her art and then brought it into the world in inventive ways too.

While Nick Cave is primarily a musician/songwriter, this book is a visual record of Cave’s creative journey filled with his early sketchbooks, photos, drawings, and typewritten song lyrics annotated by hand. Many of us artists work in sketchbooks where we can feel free to be messy and exploratory and pour our hearts onto the page. Some of us need words as well as images to explore the world around us, decipher our feelings and uncover our work. I love musing over Nick’s here—so messy and wild to begin and a little more ordered as he ages as one might expect. The book is filled with photos of different parts of his life, drawings and doodles, tight handwritten scripts and taped over typewritten lyrics gone yellow with age. It’s a compendium of a wonderful artist’s creative process. A real joy to sit down with and muse over.

The shortest book on the list – I wish it were longer! – is the hardest hitting.

Julian Spalding, art critic, and former gallery and museum curator, is well qualified to critique contemporary art trends. But the “con” of the title also stands for “conceptual” (requiring only ideas and little skill or craft), and the “con” or scam that he believes much conceptual art to be.

Spalding has no problem with “modern” or progressive art that challenges the status quo – Picasso, Magritte, or David Hockney – but only the intellectual bankruptcy that the conceptual movement has ushered in.

His forthright take is controversial, but its feisty, informed, and well-argued critique suggests that the little boy pointing out the emperor’s lack of clothes may just have a point.

This book answers the excruciating question: Where are the antinomic antipodes of Los Angeles located? The British master of Pop Art, a long-time inhabitant of LA from 1964 to 2019, filled this sketchbook in his native England. There are no words in this book except for an apocryphal introduction and Hockney’s hand brushed “Yorkshire April 04”. If Henry Moore masters the ballpoint pen, David Hockney excels in watercolor. But the brush is not primarily used to fill in surfaces but to draw. The colorful water flows in fast gestures easy and attentive. “I could do this,” one thinks. Only if I had my own Yorkshire and my faraway LA. The book is also a prequel to Hockney’s most recent work, fully bucolic, produced in Normandy, France where, according to him, people know how to live. Hockney pretends to do everything unassumingly. Of course we know that this is not… show more.

A captivating biography of one of my favourite designers. This book charts the life and experience of Eileen Gray and most importantly her fierce desire to understand the process of design and explore the integrity and flexibility of the material and techniques she used. 

From exquisite lacquer work as surface decoration or tubular steel, leather, and canvas for furniture, to the smooth, modernist concrete for her most famous build, E1027, Gray mastered her materials. In doing so she recognised that when designing space, engineering and theory were not enough, and that instinct and the ‘choreography of the space’ are essential to how we recognise and understand our built environment. A wonderful exploration of a designer’s life, particularly relevant for a student of design to read.

OK, Warhol probably did not write a single word of this book, and OK, you should believe nothing in it (or that Warhol ever said). But Pat Hackett channels Warhol’s voice and attitude uncannily, and the stories, however dubious the provenance, are funny and insightful about the art world of the nineteen sixties.

Big data can be beautiful and visualisations make for a wonderful coffee-table book. In Information is Beautiful, David McCandless turns dry-as-dust data into pop art to show the kind of world we live in, linking politics to life expectancy, women’s education to GDP growth, and more. Through colourful graphics, we get vivid and novel perspectives on current obsessions, from maps of cliches to the most fashionable colours. A testament to how the power of big data comes from being able to distill information to reveal hidden patterns and discern trends. 

I’ve read a handful of Warhol biographies and this is easily my favorite. It does a good job of breaking down his life experiences, his art and the philosophies behind The Factory, his purposeful creation of himself as an icon, and his adaptations to the American fine art and underground art landscapes that changed throughout his career. The book also has plenty of great party stories involving countless celeb friends. And to offset that all, peaks into his spending. The one bummer for me was that there weren’t enough pictures. But, well, I guess that’s what all my other Warhol books are for.