Interview

David Hockney has died, aged 88. During lockdown in 2020, Martin Gayford, the author of ‘Conversations With Hockney’, spoke to him for the magazine. Spring has not been cancelled. Neither have the arts ceased to function. David Hockney’s marvellous exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery may be sadly shut, but the artist himself is firing on all cylinders. ‘I was just drawing on this thing I’m talking to you on,’ he announced when I spoke to him via FaceTime the other day. He was sitting in the sunshine outside his half-timbered farmhouse in Normandy. ‘We’re very busy here,’ Hockney explained, ‘because all the blossom is just coming out, and there’s a lot more to come. The big cherry tree looks glorious right now.

Sebastian Barry, Irish literary Laureate, is in London to promote his first play in a decade. He didn’t plan on leaving it so long, he insists; it’s just that finishing the play — On Blueberry Hill — took longer than he’d planned. How long? Most of the decade, he confesses. At one point progress was so slow that he wrote to his agent and offered to pay back the advance. ‘God knows, money is tight enough already in theatre without me taking it for not writing a play,’ he says. In his defence, Barry has been rather busy, publishing no fewer than three novels (including the Costa prize-winning Days Without End) in the time it took to finish one play. Why did On Blueberry Hill take so long then?