David Hockney: The Art of Seeing

When Andrew Marr sits down with David Hockney, the film becomes an extended conversation about Hockney's A Bigger Picture exhibition at the Royal Academy. Marr guides viewers through the Yorkshire scenes that inspired the show, while Hockney talks about his choices in color, scale, and technique as he returned to painting the countryside of his youth. The camera lingers on sketches, finished canvases, and process shots, letting Hockney explain how seasonal light and memory shape his work. The documentary keeps things focused on making and looking, and it doesn't reveal any surprises about the exhibition's outcome. We also see Hockney in his studio, testing scale through repeated studies, and he talks about the physical work of painting and public response.

Directed by Roger Parsons and released in 2012, the film features Andrew Marr as presenter alongside Hockney himself, and centers on the works shown in A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy. It was produced for cinema and television viewers.

The film helped bring Hockney's recent landscape phase to a broader public, prompting renewed interest in contemporary landscape painting and gallery attendance. It reinforced Hockney's image as an artist who blends tradition with new tools, and it fed media coverage around the Royal Academy show. It spurred further interest overall.

Critics praised the intimate format, saying the interviews and studio footage give clear insight into Hockney's methods and thinking. The film focuses on seeing and making, memory and place, and the relationship between observation and representation, including Hockney's willingness to use technology alongside paint. Some viewers noted the steady pace.

Commercial figures for the documentary aren't widely reported, since it had a limited theatrical run and was mostly seen at festivals and on television rather than as a mainstream box office release. Later broadcasts and educational screenings broadened its audience.