David Hockney is, arguably, Britain’s greatest living painter. The Yorkshireman, at 79, has lost none of his passion for painting or conversational wit. Groundbreaking for five decades, Hockney’s work is the subject of a jaw dropping exhibition that has almost taken over the NGV. David Hockney Current features over 1200 pieces. The show includes traditional portraits through to Hockney’s revolutionary embrace of the iPhone and iPad as creative devices. The NGV’s director Tony Ellwood recently chatted with Hockney at the opening of the exhibition which will run at the National Gallery of Victoria until, March 13, 2017.

David, it’s lovely to have you here. I’m very pleased to hear directly from you some words about your practice. So I’ll ask you a few questions which helps sort of position your work today. I want to start though at the very beginning, you were born in Bradford in Yorkshire, and we’d love to hear a bit about your childhood and whether or not art played a big part in your life when you were growing up there.

It did, because I always wanted to be an artist, always. Never wanted to be anything else. And my parents encouraged it, actually. They didn’t know artists couldn’t make a living. I was one the only member of my family who went on to school after the age of 16. I went to the art school.

Before I went to the art school, my mother said, “Well, you should go and get a job and why don’t you take a portfolio around the advertising agency leads or something? Which I did. And they said, “Why aren’t you going to art school?” I said, “I don’t know.” Anyway, I went back and said, “I have to go to art school. I just have to go, even if it’s just for a year.” The moment I got my foot in the door, that was it. I stayed there. I was there for four years. That’s where I learnt to draw.

You won a lot of awards at a very young age, too, didn’t you?

Yes, I did.

(Your) first major solo exhibition was at the age of 26, so that’s quite extraordinary. David, I know you’ve got great retrospectives coming up in the next year at the Tate and at the Pompidou and the Met, but this exhibition is looking at your practice just from the last ten years. It’s been a career that’s all been about innovation and experimentation. How important is the process of creating art to you today?

The process is part of the action. All I do is work. I’m just going to go on working until I fall over. That’s all I’m doing. I don’t go out much now. I’m too deaf to go out because if you go out in the evening you’re going out to listen to something. And I’m not very good at listening. So I just work. I’m perfectly happy. I read a lot. We watch some television. I go to bed at 9 o’clock.

The other thing that’s interesting is while you’re trying to paint a very mundane life, you’re actually an extremely exciting, innovative artist. You’re coming every day to the studio and you’re pushing yourself. You’re doing new things.

Yes, you have to push yourself. I’ve always pushed myself.

This exhibition shows that particularly well with the use of digital technology, so the iPhone and the iPad. What started this great love of using these two new tools in your practice?

I first used a computer in 1986, and the computer then was the size of a big room. We were taken down to Wiltshire in England and you had to draw on it. Drawing on it was okay, but when you’d finish the drawing, the drawing itself was too minutes later. The lines weren’t there.

I thought it’s not really a very good medium for a draftsman. Then I used the computer again in 1991 I think. It had gotten a little bit better, but not that much. Then I never used it until the iPhone came. I got an iPhone and I resisted mobile phones a bit because I thought I remembered the story about Degas and the phone. Do you know the story?

The story is the turn of the last century Degas was told you now can have a telephone. And you can speak to somebody the other side of Paris. Degas said, “Yes, but how do you know he wants to speak to you?” They said, “There’s a bell on this phone. And you pick it up.” And Degas’ reply was “Like a servant.” I thought yes, you’re at everybody’s beck and call with a mobile phone, but you’re not really.

Then I got one. We all got iPhones in 2009. I got the brushes app on it, and I started drawing. And I quickly realized this was a new medium and it was really good. You could actually work in the dark. You could do a lot of things.

Then in 2010, we heard they were doing an iPad, making it bigger, and so I got one straightaway from California. Had it sent to Bridlington. And a lot of these were actually drawn in 2010. I just began drawing on it and thought it was a marvellous new medium, I think.

I’m still doing it now. Recently, although I’ve been painting, just when I came back from England in July/August, they’d put up all the things that were going to be in Australia, all the iPad drawings were put up in my studio, and that made me  “Oh, well, I think I’ll do some more.” The last things in the show were done only two months ago, actually. I’m going back to paint now, but it’s a great new medium.

And what’s exciting is that (you’ve) never shown this amount of digital work in any exhibition before, so the very first room you walk into, the “Red Room” actually shows around 1,200 of these digital drawings, many of them rotating on screen. It’s really worth spending some time in there.

The next room after the digital room is showing David’s largest work, which is the “Bigger Trees Near Warter” painting, which is the work we mentioned on loan from the Tate. Twelve-and-a-half metres long, comprised of 50 different panels. Could you tell us a bit more about that work?

I’d started painting because I had a very small studio in Bridlington, the stairs were difficult, and the stairs made it impossible to get a canvas more than four-foot-wide around the corner. So when I wanted to do bigger pictures, I just put a few together and started painting them like this.

Then I’d also started using the computer. My sister introduced me to the computer and when I’d finish work in Bridlington at 6 o’clock, I’d come in and my sister would say, “Can I scan them?” And she’d scan them and send them to L.A. We could send them to L.A.

I realized how I could do a very big picture without a ladder, without using ladders, which if you use ladders it’s always a big difficult because if you step back you might fall or something. So I realized yes, but we could photograph each day’s work and then I could build it up on the computer.

That’s what we did. I worked it out in L.A. and then we went back and before we went back, J.P. had ordered 50 trays because if you’re doing all this outside you’ve got to think of how you’re going to move them about because they’re oil paints. And he had 50 trays made and things.

That’s what we put them in. I knew there was a deadline but the deadline wasn’t the Royal Academy, who I’d asked for the big wall. I did say can I have a big wall, and I remember I thought they might ask me how I was going to do it. But they didn’t ask me that. They asked me would it be for sale. I was a bit shocked. I thought I don’t know whether it would be for sale or not. I hadn’t even painted it yet.

They did say okay. We painted it in a month outside. The deadline was about the 15th of April because the leaves would be on the trees too much then. We went back and forth, back and forth. One time we took out 18 canvases and I worked on 18 of them. But the very big tree in the middle, I had to draw that in the studio because it covered 35 canvases. We did a little film about it. You could have it here.

We made a little film about it. When I was putting it up in the Royal Academy, I felt the bad vibes in the back of my neck, actually. I knew they’d say “oh, hello, David. How are you this morning?” And when I wasn’t there, “that fucking Hockney is putting up on the whole way or something”. I knew this (laughs)

Anyway, it was good. Actually, when we did it, I did say, “Well, the first place it has to be is the Royal Academy,” and the Royal Academy in the summer show. And so it had to take up the whole wall. Because if I hadn’t have taken up the whole wall, they’d have put something else there as well. So I knew it had to take up every bit of it. And it did.

Then afterwards, we then made, because we could make reproductions of a painting three foot by four foot and print them, so we then printed three others and put them up. So I said, “It’s like a cloister now.” I thought it was very good. I gave the painting to the Tate because I thought what am I going to do with it now? I don’t know what to do with it, great big thing. So I gave it to the Tate, and I gave them the other pieces, and they put it up there for a while. Then they let it out on tour. It’s here, isn’t it?

Absolutely, so you’ll see that after the Red Room. You’ll see we’ve also gone with the digital reproduction of that piece as well, to create this beautiful immersive space. It’s really a stunning component of the show. 

Another element of the exhibit that you’ll discover after a few series of landscape works as well is a room that has 82 portraits and one still life. It’s an extraordinary body of work. It’s viewed by you as one work. It has the work I referred to that’s just been shown at the Royal Academy. 

David, could you tell us a bit about that series? What was the genesis behind it, and what was the process for the sitters?

I’d gone back to America in July 2013. We were going to do a show in San Francisco in October. We were a bit depressed when we got back because of Dominic (Elliot – DH’s assistant who committed suicide in 2013). One day J.P. just sat there looking like that (head in hands), and I thought I’ll paint you.

I painted him. And it took three days to paint. I thought well, you can portrait in three days. You can paint a portrait in two or three hours, actually. And I did one or two more using different chairs and things. But then I realized I needed the feet in, so I built a little platform and put a chair on it. And then I thought well, I can ask a lot of people to come and sit for three days. Three days isn’t that much. It could be Friday, Saturday, Sunday. To ask somebody to pose for a week means you’ve to take a week off, or two weeks. I sat for Lucian Freud for 120 hours.

I couldn’t ask people do that that. So when I’d done about 15, I realized it was quite an interesting technique. They were all sitting in the same chair with either a green or blue background. And I saw them all as individuals. That’s what they were. They were all individuals. I got 75 people, some are in it twice or three times. And then after I painted about 40, I then thought we could show them. I suggested to the Royal Academy again, the Sackler rooms. That’s what we did, just four years after the other exhibition. They made a lot of money on the other exhibition, so they did it.

David, the whole world seems to be watching you at the moment in terms of what you’ve been doing and the process of how you’re making art. This particular exhibition I think must take an enormous amount of courage because you’re actually revealing, particularly through the digital screens, how you construct images. It’s a very honest way of showing technique and process. Do you see it as an act of courage, sharing that kind of information to an audience?

It’s there. If you draw on an iPad, you can play it back. Every mark is recorded. It plays it back very quickly, actually. But it took us six years to get to this. It was only after about three years I realized people were interested in watching it. I should have known. Everybody likes watching someone draw, really.

When we did the Royal Academy show in 2012, we didn’t really have them there. There were one or two on an iPad, displaying quickly, and nobody noticed them much. You wouldn’t notice them much.

When we got to Cologne, the last bit, I’d realized more about these. But then really the first place we showed them bigger was in San Francisco. That was very successful there. People watched them. I thought well, yeah, it’s good. Here, now, we have a 15-screen thing, and you can watch the drawing. Because it’s 15 screens, you can see the drawing being done even if on a small screen you couldn’t. It’s just there. So you have to take notice of it. I do. I thought well, you might as well show this. Why not? Yeah,  I don’t mind. I’ve the courage.

Davi Hockney Current runs at the National Gallery of Victoria until March 13, 2017.