COVER STORY : Drawing on the Inside : In times of hardship and joy, David Hockney has turned not only to pen and paper but also to photocopies and faxes to sketch out his reflections on life and those near to him.

On Feb. 19, 1978, the day of his father’s funeral, David Hockney drew a portrait of his mother. Her coat is still buckled up, her hands gently crossed in her lap, her eyes cast downward.

“It was my way of sitting with her,” the artist explains. “She said, ‘Oh, David, those paintings. I look so sad.’ And I said, ‘Well, of course, you were sad. It was a very sad day.’ ”

Hockney has also drawn his mother in happier times, capturing her in ink, in crayon, in photographic collages. He has drawn her asleep and awake, in good health and poor, at home and in the hospital.

Since the ‘60s, Hockney’s paintings, photographs and other portrayals of his “mum,” friends, sun-drenched swimming pools and other landscapes have become among the most familiar images of our time, on display in museums, galleries and pretty much anywhere posters, greeting cards and calendars are sold. By 1988, when the Los Angeles County Museum of Art put together its major Hockney retrospective, there had already been more than 200 solo exhibitions of the popular artist’s work.

What few people have seen, however, are the drawings that have accompanied nearly every step of that long, successful career. Although the 58-year-old artist has created hundreds of drawings through the years--very few as studies for other work--most are in his own or other private collections rather than at museums and have been rarely exhibited.

“Drawing is a private little activity for me,” Hockney explains to a visitor at his sprawling Hollywood Hills studio. “I’ve got stacks of drawings that have never really left here. Sketchbooks that have never been seen.”

But on Thursday, again at the L.A. County Museum of Art, more than 150 of Hockney’s drawings will go on display. The show, organized by the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, both of which hosted the show last year, is the artist’s first major drawing retrospective.

“The major problem was deciding what to leave out,” says British art lecturer Paul Melia, co-curator of the exhibition (with Ulrich Luckhardt in Hamburg). “There were drawings from every year. Some artists might draw, then leave it for a while and go back. Drawings are constant for David.”

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Hockney has been “making marks on pieces of paper” since he was a boy in Bradford, an industrial city in Yorkshire, England. He draws all the time, keeping pads of paper near telephones and elsewhere. Chatting with a reporter, he reaches for a pen and idly makes shapes and doodles on a nearby letter. Melia recalls that Hockney even sometimes drew on photocopies of drawings they were discussing for inclusion in the show.

“He looks and thinks with a pencil,” says Stephanie Barron, the L.A. County Museum of Art’s senior curator of 20th century art and coordinator of curatorial affairs. “His sketches and drawings are the reflection of his observations, his travels and his thoughts.”

Sitting in his studio, talking about those sketches and drawings, Hockney says it simply: “Drawing is older than even spoken language. It comes from a very deep desire to depict and to communicate.”

It is also, of course, convenient. “You might not have oil paint constantly at hand, but you do have [drawing] materials. And unlike painting or photography, it’s very, very immediate. I never travel without sketchbooks or other drawing materials.”

Hockney came back from Egypt in the early 1960s, for instance, with dozens of drawings, and his images of Los Angeles have become almost its international profile. His drawings reflect his fascination with everything from the city’s swimming pools and winding roads to its traffic signals and house numbers.

Several of the drawings in this show have been lent anonymously, but as might be expected of an artist who has lived here on and off for 30 years, a number have come from Los Angeles collections. There is a 1974 drawing of Andy Warhol from Steve Martin’s collection, for instance, and others from such prominent local collections as those of Douglas Cramer, Robert Halff and Beatrice and Philip Gersh.

Portraits in the show also include those of such local arts patrons as photographer Betty Freeman and Dr. Leon Banks, and the show includes many other portraits as well.

“The most complicated and interesting thing we look at is another human being,” Hockney told the Daily Telegraph in London before his exhibition opening there last fall. “That’s the hardest thing to draw.”

The quickness of a drawing makes it less intrusive, LACMA curator Barron suggests: “There is tremendous sensitivity in the ink and color crayon drawings, a psychological intimacy and an observation that I think is much harder to achieve in the medium of painting.”

Sometimes the British colorist observes himself in self-portraits he has drawn sporadically since the ‘50s. In 1983, he did them every morning for weeks on end.

“I got up and looked in the mirror and drew myself,” he recalls. “When you’re drawing someone else, it is their mood and your mood together, of course, that creates whatever’s there. But when you’re drawing yourself, even the way you draw is created by the mood, which is also the way you look.”

Hockney has been doing self-portraits again recently, and the artist has returned many times to other faces as well.

As Barron points out, there is “a certain group of characters who he continues to revisit over the decades. Such people as [British textile designer and longtime Hockney friend] Celia Birtwell, his parents and [the late museum curator and longtime Hockney friend] Henry Geldzahler have become integral to Hockney’s own development as an artist.”

The LACMA show follows Hockney’s friendship with Geldzahler, for instance, from their earliest encounters in the ‘60s onward.

“I realized that the reason there are so many drawings of Henry is he always asked me to draw him,” Hockney says. “I traveled with him a lot, and he’d say, ‘If you’d like to draw me . . . ,’ and he’d sit down in a chair, and I’d say, ‘Well, if you’re going to sit like that, yes, I’m going to draw you.’ ”

There are also drawings of Geldzahler as he lay dying in 1994, and Hockney makes a point of explaining that his friend “asked me to draw him when he was dying. I went to visit him a lot and I wouldn’t have drawn him, because I would have felt it was a bit of an intrusion. He asked me to read to him. Then he did say, ‘Draw me,’ and he wasn’t looking terrific, but I drew him.”

Hockney’s sketchbook of those drawings is in the LACMA show.

Asks Barron: “Wasn’t that about closure? He had to do that sketchbook. It’s almost as if he couldn’t have left Henry out there for us robust but in fact had to show him in his last days. We celebrated Henry, [and] it is like watching a friend die. . . . These drawings and sketches allow us to share the artist’s intimate observations in a way that a painting never would.”

Hockney has done portraits of literary figures such as Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden, but he returns again and again to family and friends.

“Partly it’s that I simply like to draw people I know,” he explains. “I’ve not really drawn many people I only met for the first time to come and draw them. How would I know what they’re like, really?

“Most artists have drawn the people around them--Velazquez drawing the Spanish royal family, the servants. The more you know them, the less you worry about struggling for a likeness. You say, ‘Well, it will come.’ ”

What is it like to be drawn by Hockney?

“You have to sit quietly and not move for about two hours,” says one portrait subject. “He is very intense. He is completely centered on what he is doing, and what he sees comes out directly in his hand, simultaneously. He doesn’t make preliminary diagrams or drawings.”

Hockney says much the same thing. He can’t bear any background noise while he’s working, refuses to put on music and says his concentration is enormous. Even if they take him just two or three hours to do, for instance, he can’t do much else afterward.

“I found at that level of concentration, I can do two a day,” he says. “It does exhaust you.”

But it also creates an indelible memory, apparently. British curator Melia recalls showing Hockney poor copies of drawings from 30 years ago that Hockney could still remember drawing.

“It is amazing how it floods the memory,” Hockney says. “I can remember exactly where and when it was--even 30 years later. You can work on a painting for a while, leave it and come back. With drawings, you rarely do that. Drawings are one go.”

Consider the problems drawing his dachshunds Stanley and Boodgie: “I had to put large sheets of paper all over the house because if the dogs lay down in a nice position, and I thought they might stay there for 20 minutes, I couldn’t then get up and go get the paper because they’d follow me. I realized if I wanted to do this, I had to prepare and have stuff everywhere. Which I did.”

The artist has set drawings aside only rarely, as when he was heavily into photography or theater design, and he has often turned to the discipline of drawing at difficult times. In 1959, Melia says, Hockney started drawing when, as a student at London’s Royal College of Art, he ran into obstacles painting. When Hockney experienced a painting block in the 1970s, Melia continues, “he abandoned several paintings. The way he saw to go forward was to return to drawing, which he did by going to Paris.”

The drawing helps him get through those transitions, Hockney explains. Before he went to Paris for two years, where he concentrated on drawing, “I wanted to stop painting in London, so I went off. It took me a while to work things out, but I just expect that.

“I first started working in the theater then--I started [designing stage sets and costumes for Stravinsky’s opera] ‘The Rake’s Progress’ in Paris. Any period when I’m not sure exactly what to do, I simply go back to drawing.”

Drawing is the constant in Hockney’s career, agrees his longtime dealer, Peter Goulds, whose Venice-based L.A. Louver will complement the LACMA show with its own Hockney drawing exhibition from Thursday to March 16: “Only through drawing is his continuum of ideas maintained. Drawing for David is a means of inquiry, investigation and research. A retrospective has some special meaning because he is one of the few contemporary artists whose work can be examined and understood through his drawing.”

The word “drawing” for Hockney also sweeps in considerably more than works in crayon, charcoal and ink, of course. Hockney’s 1982 New York exhibition of photo collages, for instance, was called “Drawing With a Camera,” and the drawing exhibition includes not just photo collages but also fax and photocopy drawings.

While there were just two fax drawings in the Hamburg and London shows, the increased exhibition space at LACMA permits the display of larger fax works as well. The additions range from a four-page fax put together as a drawing to “Pacific Surf,” a fax drawing made up of 288 individually faxed pages.

Hockney is recently back from one of his frequent trips to northern England--which still colors his speech, despite his long residence here. His mother, Laura, now 95, lives with his sister, Margaret, an herbalist. He has a studio in their home in Bridlington, a seaside resort town in Yorkshire not far from his hometown of Bradford, and among his newest paintings are ones of family and friends there.

But just as he says he is tiring of new technologies and is less impressed with computers than he used to be, one has only to look around the Hollywood Hills studio to document his continuing fascination with them. On a wall near the front door are eight photographic images that look like paintings but are actually specialized laser jet prints. Photographs were scanned into special computers, then photographic images were printed directly onto watercolor paper.

Hockney also recently painted flowers in a vase, after which the painting and flowers each were photographed and combined for a new photograph that is also now hanging in the studio. On hand, too, are etchings of other still lifes and the dogs. An exhibition is underway in Vienna that also includes images of his dogs and still lifes, and, he says softly, “I think I’m going backwards sometimes. All my work lately is all about nearness.”

The outgoing artist also admits to staying closer to home these days (when he is actually in Los Angeles and not traveling), partly because of the limited places he can smoke and partly because of his growing deafness. A heart attack in 1990 also made him aware of his own mortality, says dealer Goulds, “and I think together with the sadness of his continuing to lose his hearing, it has made him more isolated and inward-looking.”

That could mean more drawings, and Melia is already talking about the possibility of future exhibitions.

“Having seen so many, many drawings,” he says, “it became evident to us quite early on that one could do three or four drawing retrospectives of Hockney’s work. I hope it’s not too long before somebody does another one.”

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“David Hockney: A Drawing Retrospective,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Thursday through April 28. Tuesdays to Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Adults, $6; students and senior citizens, $4; free on the second Wednesday of each month. (213) 857-6000.