A self-portrait of this major artist, told through a wide-ranging series of interviews and conversations with Martin Gayford.

David Hockney’s exuberant work is widely loved and widely praised, but he is also an incisive and original thinker on art. Based on a series of conversations between Hockney and the art critic Martin Gayford, this book distills the essence of the artist’s lifelong meditations on the problems and paradoxes of representing a three-dimensional world on a flat surface.

How does drawing make one “see things clearer and clearer and clearer still”? What significance do differing media, from a Lascaux cave wall to an iPad, have for the images we see? What is the relationship between the images we make and the reality around us? And how can we fully enjoy the pleasures of just looking—at trees, or faces, or sunrises?

These conversations are punctuated by wise and witty observations by both artist and interviewer on many other artists—Vermeer, Tiepolo, Caravaggio, Van Gogh, and Monet among them—and enlivened by shrewd insights into the contrasting social and physical landscapes of California, where Hockney spent so many years, and East Yorkshire, his birthplace, to which he has now returned.