Martin Gayford

A collection of legendary British artist David Hockney's insights into art, life, nature, creativity and much more. 'I've always been a looker ... that's what artists do' This anthology of quotations by David Hockney follows in the successful format of 'The World According to' series. Ranging across topics including drawing, photography, nature, creativity, the internet and much more, The World...

I won't read a more interesting book all year... utterly fascinating – A. N. Wilson, Sunday Times Enormously good-humoured and entertaining... Hockney asks big questions about the nature of picture-making and the relationship between painters and photography in a way that no other contemporary artists seems to. – Andrew Marr, New Statesman A new, compact edition of David Hockney and...

A Times Best Art Book of 2022 Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud 1939–1954 offers insightful context and commentary with reproductions of the young Lucian Freud's letters that reveal the foundations of the artist's personality and creative practice. The young Lucian Freud was described by his friend Stephen Spender as "totally alive, like something not entirely human, a leprechaun,...

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'A burst of springtime joy' — Daily Telegraph 'A springboard for ideas about art, space, time and light' — The Times 'Lavishly illustrated' — Guardian David Hockney reflects upon life and art as he experiences lockdown in rural Normandy. On turning eighty, David Hockney sought out rustic tranquillity for the first time: a place to watch...

A Sunday Times Art Book of the Year A visual journey through five centuries of the city known for centuries as 'La Serenissima' - a unique and compelling story for both lovers of Venice and lovers of its art. Venice was a major centre of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the...

Sunday Times Art Book of the Year. This is a unique and compelling journey through five centuries of the city known as 'La Serenissima' - a perfect companion for both lovers of Venice and lovers of its art. Venice was a major centre of art in the Renaissance: the city where the medium of oil on canvas became the norm....

David Hockney's exuberant work is highly praised and widely loved, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. In this remarkable book, a record of a decade and a half of conversations with art critic Martin Gayford, Hockney reveals via reflection, anecdote, passion and wit the fruits of his lifelong meditations on the problems and...

The bestselling book of conversations between David Hockney and art critic Martin Gayford as they explore the nature of creativity. David Hockney's exuberant work is highly praised and widely loved, but he is also something else: an incisive and original thinker on art. In this now classic book, filled with anecdote, insight, passion and wit, Hockney reveals the fruits of...

A Times Book of the Year 'This is as clear a piece of writing about the experience of looking at a great painting as I have ever read ... Gayford seems to have seen everything and thought deeply about all of it' Andrew Marr, New Statesman 'If you are someone who revels in the deliciousness of oil paintings, who looks...

A picture, says David Hockney, is the only way that we can give an account of what we see. But all picture-makers face a common problem: how to compress three-dimensional people, things, and places onto a flat surface? The results are often pigeonholed as paintings, photographs, or films. Alternatively, they may be sorted by date and style: medieval, Renaissance, or...

In the course of a career thinking and writing about art, Martin Gayford has travelled all over the world both to see works of art and to meet artists. Gayford's journeys, often to fairly inaccessible places, involve frustrations and complications, but also serendipitous encounters and outcomes, which he makes as much a part of the story as the final destination....

'The sunflower is mine', Van Gogh once declared. No other artist has been so closely associated with a specific flower, and his sunflower pictures are among his most loved works. In this compact and richly illustrated book, Martin Gayford explores the history of the National Gallery's Sunflowers, painted in Arles in 1888 shortly before Paul Gauguin came to stay with...

A new biography of Michelangelo by the acclaimed author of Constable in Love and The Yellow House. 'An absorbing book, beautifully told and with the writer fully in command of a huge body of research' Philip Hensher, Mail on Sunday There was an epic sweep to Michelangelo's life. At 31 he was considered the finest artist in Italy, perhaps the...

Lucian Freud brings together, for the first time, Lucian Freud's oil on copper paintings, including his lost portrait of Francis Bacon and two works that have never been reproduced before. In the early 1950s, Lucian Freud produced several works in oil paint on copper, a technique favoured by 17th-century artists such as Rembrandt and Frans Hals, but unusual for a...

A sumptuous single-volume edition of Phaidon's acclaimed overview of one of the greatest painters of our time Larger-than-life British artist Lucian Freud enjoyed a career lasting over seven decades. He worked almost until the day he died, leaving a portrait of friend and studio assistant David Dawson unfinished. Now available for the first time in one elegantly combined edition, this...

In this wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and sometimes provocative new book, leading sculptor Antony Gormley, informed and energised by a lifetime of making, and art critic and historian Martin Gayford, explore sculpture as a transnational art form with its own compelling history. The authors' lively conversations and explorations make unexpected connections across time and media. Sculpture has been practised by every culture...

Winner of the prestigious BolognaRagazzi New Horizons Award 2019 A History of Pictures for Children takes readers on a journey through art history, from early art drawn on cave walls to the images we make today on our computers and phone cameras. Based on the bestselling book for adults, this children's edition of A History of Pictures is told through...

Lucian Freud (1922-2011), widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of our time, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. The daily narrative of their encounters takes us into that most private place, the artist's studio, and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master—both technical and subtly psychological. From this emerges...

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER "We have lost touch with nature, rather foolishly as we are a part of it, not outside it. This will in time be over and then what? What have we learned?... The only real things in life are food and love, in that order, just like [for] our little dog Ruby... and the source of art...

Sunday Times Art Book of the Year 2018 'If you are interested in modern British art, the book is unputdownable. If you are not, read it.' – Grey Gowrie, Financial Times 'All the good stories, and more, are here ... this is a genuinely encyclopaedic work, unlike anything else I have come across on the topic, informed by a deep...