David Hockney : "A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen."

Legendary painter David Hockney has spent a lifetime creating and thinking about art. Now he reflects on the depth of its history in a new book called: "A History of Pictures: From the Cave to the Computer Screen."

...Light, and where it comes from, is every painter's preoccupation. And for Hockney, light on water is a particular fascination. "Say a swimming pool: The water is transparent. How do you paint transparency?" he asks. "It's always a nice problem to me. ... Water in a swimming pool is transparent and it has reflections and things. That's what [it's] all about — reflections."

Hockney is known for bright, flat paintings of Los Angeles and vivid English landscapes. His best-known painting — 1967's A Bigger Splash — shows a California swimming pool the moment after someone has jumped in. (You can see it here.) A tan diving board angles in from the bottom right and a lively white splash rises up from the aquamarine water.

Hockney painted Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar in 1977.

Richard Schmidt/Museum of Modern Art, Ludwig Foundation, Vienna/Abrams Books

"I spent longer on the splash than on any other thing in the painting," Hockney says. "I spent about a week painting it because it's painted with small brushes. ... I mean I didn't want to just take a brush and splash it like that. I wanted to paint it slowly, and I thought, Then it contradicts the splash, really."

So many of Hockney's works are joyful. They feature sundrenched California scenes, British woodlands brimming with fuchsia and neon-green trees, the Grand Canyon in vivid oranges. (When he showed the canyon pieces in London, he put big mirrors in the gallery corners to add dimension to the paintings.)

Hockney says the first thing he looks at in anyone's painting is the surface, "the paint itself and so on. And then you might then see a figure; then you might see something else. But I think, first of all, you see the surface." It's a painter's way of looking. Someone else might look first at the pear, the face, the horse — but not Hockney.

That artist believes painting can change the world. In the midst of all our miseries, he says, art lets us see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious. "I do get a deep pleasure from looking," he says. "I mean, I can look at a little puddle on a road in Yorkshire and just have the rain falling on it and think it's marvelous. ... I see the world as very beautiful."

Artist David Hockney Says The Drive To Create Pictures 'Is Deep Within Us'

At nearly 80 years old, Hockney is busier than ever.

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