Ever since I began painting a few years ago I have seen other artists differently. I have lived as a sculpture for more than two decades and used my body as a canvas. When I picked up a brush my way of seeing art changed. Years of studying photography had trained me to chase the light that reflects off things. Painting taught me to feel the air between the eye and the object. I didn’t realise David Hockney was about to change my perspective in seeing once again. He’s spent more than sixty years exploring that territory and it fills his new show at Annely Juda Fine Art.
I first met Hockney after painting him as a teapot with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth during a four-day sprint when I made my first three hundred portraits. I brought the little painting to him at his National Gallery show and later received a kind note that put me on his friends and family mailing list. I had introduced him to Johnny Depp not long before this show and when Johnny couldn’t make the opening I volunteered myself as replacement. I had seen the Fondation Louis Vuitton retrospective in Paris and left with forty questions written in my notes. The London show gave me the chance to ask them and to speak to his sitters, family and friends.
