He is, for all his popularity, a figure who divides opinion. He is widely admired as one of the finest draughtsmen of his generation and for his remarkable sense of colour. His fascination with technology meanwhile has been seen as both innovative and as a distraction from his real metier. The content of his pictures is lauded for its evocation of place — a California swimming pool or a cool 1970s interior — and criticised for a lack of depth. He has been dismissed as merely a lightweight if joyous flâneur like Raoul Dufy and hailed as encapsulating the spirit of the age. 

This critical uncertainty is not something that unduly worries Hockney himself. Although he is exceptionally well-versed in traditional art history, and in Secret Knowledge wrote perceptively and provocatively on the techniques of Caravaggio and Vermeer, his own concern is not with posterity but with the ongoing project of looking. "You have to decide to look," he says. "Looking is a positive act."

Hockney decided to look early in life. By the age of 11 he had already decided to become an artist — even if he was unsure about exactly what one did — and he set about it with cussedness. He was a top-set boy at Bradford Grammar School until it dawned on him that it was the bottom-form pupils who were given more art lessons in lieu of subjects of greater academic rigour. So he simply stopped working until he had been demoted and could focus on art instead. 

From that point on he followed his path determinedly, tracing a peripatetic route that took him from Bradford to London, Paris, Los Angeles and now, for the past seven years, Bridlington on the unprepossessing Yorkshire coast between Scarborough and Hull. This full circle back to the place where Hockney used to come as a boy to stack corn sheaves as a holiday job and to the house where his mother later lived is fitting. The "looking" he engages in there seems to be more serious than many of his previous enthusiasms because his aim is more than just producing pictures. He is intent instead on revitalising the landscape tradition.