David Hockney’s New Toys : The renowned artist is still producing his lush paintings, but also continuing a romance with high tech. After a fax fling, he’s now experimenting with laser printers and a revolutionary new video camera.

It’s a great time to stop by David Hockney’s studio up in the Hollywood Hills. His new paintings of the Santa Monica Mountains, not yet finished, are on the wall and on easels. Large photographs from a recent cruise to Alaska are in stacks around the room. And further inside, beyond all the paint tubes and brushes, a laser printer is spewing out colorful prints generated by his brand-new still video camera.

Hockney’s muse is in full form. No matter that the British-born painter, set designer, and photographer is perhaps the most popular and well-known artist of his time. At 53, he is still experimenting with not just subject matter but technologies.

While other artists of similar popularity and stature might take fewer risks, Hockney is simply too curious to stand still. Besides, one discovery feeds the next. From photography he moved to photo collages, then on to experiments with assorted office copy machines--cameras of another sort--which resulted in what he called his Home Made Prints. Next came fax art, and now, entering the ‘90s, he’s come up with yet another blend of art and technology.

Watch him in the studio with his new camera. He’s photographing everyone who comes by--the framer, his hair stylist, a museum curator, this reporter--and taking those photographs from camera to video monitor to print in just minutes. (See accompanying story.) Prints go home with guests, up on the wall over by the studio door, and out in the mail in little books for friends.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Stephanie Barron, who co-organized the museum’s 1988 Hockney retrospective, calls the new work “an interesting development. When he makes collages, he has an ability to manipulate the images to create a new composition, and the camera seems to intensify certain colors which he’s able to highlight to his advantage. He’s only had the camera for a month, and given his history, he’ll continue to push the parameters of the technology much more in coming months.”

Already Hockney’s using it to design exhibitions, even to work out immediate problems in his paintings. There’s a laser print up on the wall above a painting of the Santa Monica Mountains, and, he says, he’ll sometimes photograph half a painting, print out an image from the copier, draw on it in color, then redraw it on canvas.

Science is inextricably bound up with art for Hockney. “We’re living in a world that’s a bit topsy-turvy. They might be very cynical about beauty at CalArts but they take it very seriously indeed at Caltech. All mathematicians take it very seriously because they react to it. In that sense, sometimes science is more interesting that what we call art now. There’s a thrill to it--there’s even a joy in it you don’t often find in art.”

So bring on the new technology. When Hockney tried the new video camera at a recent seminar in Silicon Valley, he had to have one. “All art has an element of play in it, and I said ‘let’s get going on it.’ ”

Nobody has caught Los Angeles in sunshine the way David Hockney has, eulogizing the city’s lawns, swimming pools, and beautiful young men. He’s lived here since 1964, and from these works alone, his bold, colorful images have become familiar to masses of people who may not even know his name.

The monumental Hockney retrospective at the County Museum of Art in early 1988 travelled on to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and London’s Tate Gallery, packing the house in every city. Sprawling across three decades of his work, the show was LACMA’s biggest contemporary art draw and among its top draws ever--the opening night crowd was so big that people had to be let into the galleries in shifts.

A celebrity as much as painter at this point in his life, Hockney has been chronicling his world not just in paintings and photographs but in books and in 1983, even a full-length movie, “A Bigger Splash.” He has designed for the opera and ballet both here and abroad, including sets, costumes and lighting for Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in 1987 at the Los Angeles Music Center Opera.

Much of that activity takes shape in his hillside studio, a big, bright room that is just up the stairs from what must be the most colorful house this side of a Hockney painting. The walls of his cozy living room are bright orange, pink, yellow and green. A nearby alcove is deep pinks and yellows, with an orange ceiling, and colorful paper fish hang from trees above a rock garden out the picture window. The porch that circles the house’s interior is bright blue, with equally bright red picnic tables and red and yellow chairs.

Perhaps it is because he is going deaf--there are now hearing aids in both ears--that he has been looking in recent years for more and more ways to see. And it is clear from chatting with him that at the same time he is widening his technological skills, he is recycling that knowledge to inform his paintings.

“I was always interested in printing and its effect on painting. Without printing, we’d know very little about painting. So I knew there were real connections (but) I realized that you have to combine high-tech with low-tech. Low-tech is the hand and a pair of scissors, and with that and high-tech, you can do marvelous things, wonderful things.”

Hockney’s experimentation with photography caught the public imagination in the early ‘80s when he began working with Polaroid images. The complexity of the artworks grew and grew, sweeping in complicated multi-image collages of the Brooklyn Bridge and Grand Canyon, then culminating in the incredible, 700-photograph “Pearblossom Hwy., 11-18th April 1986.”

It’s probably no coincidence that the same year he completed “Pearblossom,” he created his first Home Made Prints, using an office photocopier to create colorful drawings. The catalogue to his 1988 retrospective includes 23 pages of Home Made Prints, followed by his comment that “New technologies have started revolutions that need not frighten us. They can be humanized by artists.”

If it involves printing, says Hockney, he explores it. “My interest in the (copying) machine was philosophical really. I realized it was a printing machine and a camera of a new kind. I also realized it had political implications. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s that technology that brought down Communism.”

Hockney is asked to elaborate. How did copiers bring down Communism? “Because 17 years ago, Brezhnev rejected that technology. I found out you couldn’t buy a Xerox machine in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe because if you could, you’d have a free press. Think about it. So that technology was rejected for political reasons. (And what’s happened now is) that the technology is making all governments suffer. It’s harder to keep secrets, isn’t it? And that deeply appeals to my anarchistic heart.”

Next came the fax machine. Karen Kuhlman, Hockney’s business administrator, recalls she unintentionally introduced him to the fax machine as art generator. “We originally got a fax machine for his office here,” she explains. “David has an anecdote about how he came by and I was sending a fax through and I taught him how to use the machine. He says he went away and experimented, then came back and taught me even more about it.”

What happened, Hockney adds, is that he experimented to learn the way the fax machine reads images. “People were amazed they were so clear,” Hockney says, “but I explored what the machine was doing and made pictures accordingly and they worked very well.”

Enter the still video camera and color laser copier. Hockney and his studio assistant Richard Schmidt went to a three-day computer software workshop for photographers in July where Hockney first used the still video camera. Just before going, they had purchased a state-of-the-art color laser copier, which offered new capabilities to manipulate images, and the still video camera could take advantage of that.

Resembling a traditional 35 mm camera in appearance, the still video camera can capture as many as 50 images on a floppy disk instead of on film or videotape. The disk is inserted into a still video playback unit whose operator--in this case, Hockney--may then instruct the color laser copier to print the images out in one or another of innumerable patterns.

Schmidt says Hockney was at first disappointed with the camera, then grew more excited as he saw its potential. Today, walking a visitor through the process with obvious pleasure and excitement, Hockney explains that in playing with the camera over time, “I noticed that it sees color in a different way from other cameras. You have to explore the techniques, then begin to use them. It’s true of anything really.”

Among the results of Hockney’s experimentation are photographic images of a few dozen recent studio visitors. Says Schmidt, one of the photo subjects, “We call it David’s photo booth.”

Many of Hockney’s still video prints went up in the bar at Trumps restaurant earlier this week. Others may wind up in Hockney’s exhibition next December at New York’s Andre Emmerich Gallery. Among the possibilities is a multi-image collage of several shots of Hockney’s housedone via the new process.

Given the bright colors of the house, and the new camera’s ways with color, Hockney’s shots of his house also began as experimentations. Hockney made about 50 little books for friends called “40 Pix of my house with a still video camera and laser printer,” says Schmidt. “As he’s exploring it, he’s trying to get as much feedback as possible.”

Meanwhile, Hockney is also thinking ahead. He’s hoping to one day send color pictures from his floppy disks over the telephone line so they could be printed at the other end as well. And just last week, a new computer was delivered which Schmidt says will enable them to manipulate images digitally to remove backgrounds, combine images or add texture or color to photographs or original drawings.

Given what can now be done in terms of altering photographs, in fact, Hockney feels “the photograph is about to lose its veracity, which is a very profound change.

“For instance, we’ve had the belief that you look at a photo, and you believe that at one point in time and space, something like that existed. That is not now necessarily the case.”

Hockney’s 1980 landmark painting, “Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio,” captured Hockney’s drive up and down Nichols Canyon to his old studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, and his newest paintings of the Santa Monica Mountains similarly capture the neighborhood around his Malibu beach house. In both cases, the artist creates what he calls “an amalgam of views,” a changing perspective so that the viewer is essentially moving along the road as well.

Hockney retraces the steps leading to his new canvases: “I have a little house at the beach, and being a person with curiosity, I immediately explore the neighborhoods I live in. So I started driving up the canyons and around the mountains, and I’m also losing my hearing slowly so I splurged and put a terrific sound system in the car.

“Then I started playing Wagner and realized that some of it fit amazingly well with the landscape. So I slowly choreographed a drive that’s an hour and a half long, through the Santa Monica mountains, mostly with the music from ‘Parsifal.’ It matches everything the eye sees and the ear hears. Everybody I take on it says so even if they’ve never heard of ‘Parsifal’ or Richard Wagner. I’ve done it about 200 times. Everybody thought I was doing it for them, but I was really doing it for myself.”

Standing in front of a wall-sized painting, he describes it as “in a sense, a great big drive through the mountains. You go up the road, you look out at space, and you see the whole of Santa Monica Bay. The Santa Monica Mountains are ravishing, absolutely ravishing, and I’ve noticed that most of the people I took from Los Angeles didn’t know them. I was shocked actually. It’s so near and beautiful. On a Sunday, when everybody’s crowded down on the Pacific Coast Highway, there’s nobody up there. If it were Yorkshire on a Sunday, there would be crowds up there having picnics.”

The colorful landscapes are destined for the Emmerich show in New York, a city where he jokes that “they need a lot of color.” While the show’s final choices have yet to be made--and Hockney still has several months to work--business administrator Kuhlman says it will include paintings, color laser prints and color lithographs he recently completed at Tyler Graphics in Upstate New York. In addition to the new Santa Monica Mountains paintings, there will be portraits, abstracts, flower paintings and wave paintings.

The flower and wave paintings were originally exhibited last December at L.A. Louver Gallery in Venice (and later at Honolulu’s Contemporary Museum), and Kuhlman says that the small flower paintings available then sold for $225,000-$250,000. But nobody has any idea how to price Hockney’s laser prints at this point. “I don’t know what to do with them yet,” says Hockney. “I don’t sell them. I give them away. I don’t quite know what they are, and other people don’t know what they are either.”

It was the same with his Home Made Prints, actually. For example, not only did several of them appear in his LACMA catalogue, but the artist also created original prints first for a newspaper in his hometown of Bradford, England, then for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner.

The Herald Examiner print edition then was as large as the newspaper’s circulation at the time, or about 240,000, Hockney says. “I’ll bet the next day that (nearly all) were thrown away. . . . I bet there aren’t that many left. Very few people actually kept them.”

As for the fax art, he sent whole exhibitions worth over telephone lines. His telephone lines. “My phone bills were enormous,” he says, laughing heartily.

Hockney’s 1961 painting, “A Grand Procession of Dignitaries in the Semi-Egyptian Style,” sold for $2.2 million at Sotheby’s in May, 1989, yet Hockney clearly appreciates creating art removed from the marketplace. “I used to give things away to people who liked them, and now I can again because what I give away has no dollar value. It has another kind of value which is simply for the pleasure of the eye.”