‘I always made things a bit harder for myself’

David Hockney is marking his 80th birthday with a huge Tate show – and then it’s back to work, he tells Gaby Wood

When I arrive at David Hockney’s studio in the Hollywood Hills one winter morning, the artist is still asleep. “Do you have time to leave him for 20 minutes?” asks his assistant Jean-Pierre, before offering to show me around.

Several orderly trays of acrylic paint are laid out alongside colours in labelled jars: Naples yellow, dioxazine purple, ultramarine, teal, titanium white. There are brushes everywhere, bearing the palest traces of use – some of them so large they occupy an umbrella stand by the door. On the walls, a few works in progress: Hockney’s planned stained glass window for Westminster Abbey; a sketch of his terrace, 7B pencil resting on the easel beneath it; a wide, thin canvas, framed with black gaffer tape to accentuate its edges, and marked, so far, with just a patch of verdant green.

Outside lies the view this painting will depict: a small domestic jungle that connects the studio to the house. The terrace is bright blue, with red vertical poles and a pale pink wall behind – a scene Hockney has not tired of looking at since he moved here in 1979. It’s a rare rainy day in Los Angeles (though it’s tempting to think there’s some corner of David Hockney’s home that is forever Bradford). One happy side-effect is that, after years of drought in which Californians were banned from wasting water, he will finally be able to drain his swimming pool and repaint its famous blue squiggles.

On our return to the studio, the man is there: sitting in his usual velvet armchair, peering over green tortoiseshell glasses, holding a cigarette low between curled fingers and dressed for a game of golf with Cary Grant. There’s a boyish amusement in his face, as if he’s just remembered a joke, or thought of a prank he might play on someone later.

Would he like an ashtray, I wonder, looking around for one just before a column of ash tumbles on to the sleeve of his cardigan. I glance at the floor: brown burn marks, shaped uncannily like brushstrokes, fleck the area around his feet.

“I want an exciting life,” says Hockney, minutes after he’s rolled out of bed. “How exciting is your life?” I ask. Hockney will be 80 this summer, and speaks – perhaps owing to the time of day – in such an ironic monotone it’s as if he were being played back at the wrong speed. “I can get excitement from watching the rain come down,” he says.

It is, you might think, a fairly low bar. But there’s more: he is partial to pork scratchings, and the odd Malteser – both of which his assistants order for him online. “Because I’m pretty deaf, I don’t go out much,” Hockney elaborates, his accent still bearing the imprint of Yorkshire. “I just come in from my bedroom and work, go back to my bedroom… I’ve got a good subject here – I’m looking at the garden, but the garden makes me look at other things as well.”

You don’t need to have seen the monumental landscapes Hockney exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2012 to feel that the art historical echoes are clear: a visitor to Giverny a hundred years ago would presumably have had to grapple with an equally understated scenario. He says he only wants to paint water lilies! They’re blurry. Can he actually see anything?

It’s rare for Hockney to look back on his life – “I live in the now,” he says – but that’s what he’s found himself doing of late. The occasion for our encounter is a retrospective at Tate Britain – the largest of his career, and something he tried to put off. He has been so productive, with two major shows of new work at the Royal Academy in the past four years alone, that it seemed at first like the wrong sort of gesture. “I’m still active,” he says. A wry smile. “I mean, I’m not un-active. I’m going to go on. I think: well, how long do I have? I don’t want to waste it, I’d rather just paint.”

Yet he has also put together a gigantic book of his life’s work for his friend, the publisher Benedikt Taschen, a job of many months. And that – with its accompanying volume of drawings and supporting material – is something he is proud to leave behind. “I’m looking back, and I think: well, it’s not bad, all this,” he says, breaking into a low thrum of laughter. “Now it doesn’t matter what critics say. These books lay out my work for the future. Art history has to deal with me, not me deal with art history.”

Hockney’s position in art history is, as Tate curator Chris Stephens points out, “problematic”. Celebratory colours and simple brushstrokes have a way of pushing Hockney beyond critical appreciation – he floats to the top like a beach ball, too bright and light and gigantic not to be noticed; the nation’s favourite painter. Though his depictions, in the Sixties, of nude gay couples were bold enough for Hockney himself to describe them as “propaganda”, his subject matter is rarely difficult – the horrors of the century he’s

‘How long do I have? I don’t want to waste it, I’d rather just paint’